Stephen has made his presence felt on a much broader front. Most prickly literary estates are interested in suppressing unflattering or intrusive information, but no one combines tolltaker, brand enforcer, and arbiter of taste as relentlessly as Stephen does, and certainly not in such a personal way. In 2003, Eloise Knowlton, a Joycean and a novelist, asked permission to publish a fictional version of “Sweets of Sin,” the risqué novel that Bloom picks up for his wife, Molly. (“Ulysses” offers only a glimpse of its contents.) Stephen wrote back, “Neither I nor the others who manage this Estate will touch your hare-brained scheme with a barge pole in any manner, shape or form.” When turning down a request for permission from an academic whose work was going to be published by Purdue, he said that he objected to the name for the university’s sports teams: the Boilermakers. (He considered it vulgar.) Michael Groden, a scholar at the University of Western Ontario, spent seven years creating a multimedia version of “Ulysses,” only to have Stephen block the project, in 2003, with a demand for a permissions fee of one and a half million dollars. (Before Stephen controlled the Joyce estate, such fees were nominal.) Groden’s sin was to have praised Danis Rose’s edition of “Ulysses” as “confident and controversial,” in a reader’s report for Rose’s publisher; he had also helped the National Library of Ireland to evaluate some Joyce drafts prior to acquiring them. “You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again,” Stephen told Groden.

Stephen’s hostility toward scholarship is striking, considering the intricate and allusive nature of his grandfather’s work. Interpreters were there at the beginning—Stuart Gilbert’s guide to “Ulysses” appeared in 1930, only eight years after the book’s European publication. And it is hard to imagine Joyce’s books without all the books that have been written about them. As Joyce told one of his translators, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

It is also not easy for scholars to decode Joyce’s puzzles without addressing his personal life. Joyce frequently said that he drew his events from the newspapers and his observations from his life. “I’m like a man who stumbles,” he once said. “My foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.” In “Finnegans Wake,” Joyce describes a character whose work is written “over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body.”

More than a dozen Joyce scholars told me that what was once an area of exploration and discovery now resembles an embattled outpost of copyright law. Robert Spoo, who used to edit the James Joyce Quarterly, which is published by the University of Tulsa, quit the job to become a copyright lawyer. “New biographies, digital representations of Joyce’s work, analyses of Joyce’s manuscripts, and, to a lesser extent, criticism—they hardly exist,” he said. “People either despaired of doing them . . . or the demands were so high that they just didn’t feel it was worth continuing the discussions.” Although more than fifteen hundred letters and dozens of manuscript drafts have been discovered since Stephen gained control of the estate, scholars told me that no new biographies of Joyce or his family are under way. The estate has not licensed online versions of “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake,” seminal works for hypertext theory. Anyone who plans to study Joyce today has to wonder whether it will be worth the strain. In 2003, Thomas Staley, the director of special collections at the University of Texas, in Austin, folded the Joyce Studies Annual after twelve years, in part to avoid dealing with Stephen. “He is an almost impossible person,” Staley told me. (Buck Mulligan to Dedalus: “O, an impossible person!”)

Fortunately copyright maven Lawrence Lessig has entered the fray, filing a lawsuit against the Joyce estate for "copyright misuse" on behalf of Carol Schloss, whose book on James Joyce's daughter Stephen Joyce had tried to suppress.

Lessig is the co-founder of Creative Commons, a popular online copyright-licensing project. That effort, combined with his fight against the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, has made him a leading authority on intellectual-property issues. In the 2003 Supreme Court case Eldred v. Ashcroft, Lessig argued that the Founding Fathers did not intend copyright to become a creative straitjacket. He quoted the Constitution to the Justices: “Congress shall have power to . . . promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings.” Lessig had clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, and he expected him and the conservatives on the Court to respond to reasoning based on the original words of the framers. “But the conservatives sat silent,” he said. “It was, in some ways, the dying moments of a naïve law professor.”

Lessig thinks that Shloss’s case is more likely to succeed. “Have you seen her?” he said of Shloss. “She’s the quintessential academic—quiet, soft-spoken, modest. The idea that copyright law is going to descend on her and turn her life into hell shows that the law has lost touch with its purpose.”

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Of the two dozen people I had talked to, Lessig was one of the few who weren’t angry at Stephen Joyce. “I don’t really blame people who exercise the rights the law appears to give them,” Lessig said. “Stephen Joyce is using whatever power he has.” But he added that Stephen had strengthened Shloss’s case with the threatening letters, the calls to her publisher, the alleged spying and attempts to block her research. As Lessig saw it, the case was simple: Shloss was not trying to profit in an unseemly way off the Joyce legacy; she was an academic who was trying to make a literary argument. It was not at all important whether her argument was correct—only that it was a legitimate effort. To make her case, she needed supporting documents, and Stephen’s obstructionism had, perhaps, adversely affected the reception of the book. The Times, for example, had described it as “more like an exercise in wish fulfillment than a biography.”

“If a copyright holder misbehaves, we want people to know it’s not costless,” Lessig added. “It’s not just the tone of Stephen’s letters. It’s who the letters were sent to: researchers, archivists, and librarians, people playing by the rules. It ought to be possible for people to be good.”

Of course, the Joyce estate generates hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, so Lessig is probably in for a long fight.