SIVACRACY.NET: "The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions"

Nancy McClernan is a playwright who has a blog, Heavens to Mergatroyd. She got embroiled in an interesting lawsuit when the former director of one of her plays, Tam Lin, claimed that his staging directions constituted a copyrightable work. NYT coverage of the suit is available here. Here is an excerpt from the NYT article:

United States copyright law is notoriously complicated and open to interpretation. Though concepts and ideas, because they are not "fixed" in a tangible way, are clearly not protected by copyright, photography and choreography, for instance, are. Mr. Shechtman, who is married to the director Lynne Meadow, argues that direction can be seen as an amalgam of the two: the creation of stage pictures and movement. Mr. Sevush, of the Dramatists Guild, all but scoffs at the idea that a director, though he may be creative, is creating anything. He described the director's work as "moving around the copyrightable contributions of others."

Mr. Weidman [President of the Dramatists Guild] who worked with Mr. Mantello on the recent Broadway revival of "Assassins" — and who, in gratitude for his directorial contributions to the show, offered him a share of the authors' royalty, which Mr. Mantello declined — is more diplomatic. The director is an interpretive artist, he said, often doing brilliant work. For his work to be systematically copied by someone else, he agrees, is "manifestly unfair."

But that does not mean, he argued, that the director owns his work, any more than an actor does. Not everything creative is copyrightable. The repercussions, he said, would be too dire. If each director's staging of a relatively new play had copyright protection, very soon there would be no staging options left. The play would become so encumbered with licenses, or the risk of lawsuits, that it would be impossible to produce — a net loss to the culture. Even classic works like "Romeo and Juliet" might gradually be removed from the public domain, thus perverting the aim of copyright law, which is to increase the flow of ideas and artwork by providing an incentive to their creators. "If Leonard Bernstein had been in a position to copyright his interpretation of Mahler," Mr. Weidman asked, "would another conductor who thought that interpretation was right, and then conducted Mahler in the same way, be stealing from Bernstein?"

Nancy prevailed (as well she should have, IMO), and recently published an account of the lawsuit in the latest issue of The Dramatist, the magazine of the Dramatists Guild, entitled "The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions."

In addition, Dramatists Gulid President John Weidman is giving a public lecture at Brooklyn Law School on Oct 25th called "Art Isn't Easy: Protecting the American Playwright" that might be of interest to copyright geeks in the NYC area. You can learn more about that here.

Comments

We prevailed, although it was mighty expensive. And the actual issue of a director's copyright wasn't ruled on.

But at least Judge Kaplan gave some opinion about what he thought constituted an acceptable blocking copyright - and it sure ain't what Einhorn came up with. But more importantly our case might assist playwrights in the future in defending their work.

Posted by: NancyMc | September 24, 2006 12:18 PM

Oops, I spoke too soon. Although the Einhorns promised in court back in April to de-register Edward Einhorn's unauthorized derivative "blocking and choreography" script, they still haven't done it.

Apparently the Copyright Office will only accept one of three reasons (in writing) as valid for the de-registration of a copyright - the material wasn't copyrightable; the derivative copyright wasn't authorized; or fraud.

Instead of multiple choice, the Einhorns tried to turn it into an essay question and get extra credit for creativity. Instead of picking the choices the Copyright Office offered, David Einhorn wrote a letter saying that since they no longer had any intention of suing us over the copyright, it was no longer needed (!!!!)

Judge Kaplan (who presided over the trial in April) was not pleased to hear about this. Our attorneys asked him to have a talk with David Einhorn. Kaplan gave him 2 weeks to de-register the copyright. And he said: "I've put people in jail for this kind of shenanigans"

Presumably the Einhorns aren't crazy enough to risk incurring Judge Kaplan's wrath by NOT de-registering immediately. But you can never tell with them...

Posted by: NancyMc | November 4, 2006 02:05 AM

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