A federal judge issued a restraining order yesterday, temporarily blocking the publication of author Fredrik Colting’s book “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye”–a novel revisiting characters from a classic J.D. Salinger novel.
According to Publishers Weekly, judge Deborah Batts granted a temporary order against the book that some have described as a sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye,” and must decide in the next ten days if she will permanently enjoin publication. In addition, the judge will rule if Colting’s book was fair use of Salinger’s work.
The article explained: “Batts’s ruling is the first time that the Second Circuit has explicitly ruled that a single character from a single work is copyrightable … [Batts] ruled that Caulfield, though appearing in only one book, was sufficiently delineated.”