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Re: Bataan Death march Vet Plagiarism Suit Settled

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: December 06, 2003

"Deseret Book settles plagiarism suit

    A four-year battle that pitted a Bataan Death March survivor against Deseret Book and a Provo novelist whom the veteran accused of plagiarizing him has ended in an out-of-court settlement.

    Terms of the settlement, reached Thursday, are confidential. The agreement cancels a trial scheduled for the spring on a lawsuit filed in 1999 by Gene Jacobsen, a University of Utah professor emeritus for education administration, who claimed author Dean Hughes stole from his memoirs for use in Hughes' Children of Promise series, which was published by Deseret Book.

    "We're satisfied with the terms of the settlement," Sheri Dew, president and CEO of Deseret Book, said. "We're happy that this has been resolved."

    Jacobsen, now 82, wrote about his experiences as a supply sergeant during World War II, recording his company's attack from Japanese bombers in Manila and recalling how he suffered through 3 1/2 years as a prisoner of war.

    He said his wife typed up his manuscript in 1984 and they passed out copies to friends. Jacobsen also copyrighted his work and sent it in 1995 to Dew, who declined to publish it.

    However, Hughes purportedly said he read a copy of the work and interviewed Jacobsen about his experiences.

    The Children of Promise series follows the life of a character named Thomas as he serves an LDS Church mission in Germany, joins the military and is taken prisoner by Japanese troops. Hughes always has maintained that Thomas is fictional, but Jacobsen claimed that the character was he.

    In 2000, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that historical events cannot be copyrighted. However, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the case last year.

    Jacobsen is the father of JoAnn Jacobsen-Wells, a columnist at The Salt Lake Tribune.

    -- Pamela Manson

© Copyright 2003, The Salt Lake Tribune. "