Copyright: Its History and Its LawBowker, R. R. (Richard Rogers)
History
Copyright: Its History and Its Law
Bowker, R. R. (Richard Rogers)
Copyright -- History; Copyright -- United States -- History
A curious early case was that of Reade _v._ Conquest in 1862, in which
the son of Charles Reade had made and sold to the defendant, who
produced it at his theatre, a dramatic version of "It is never too late
to mend" in ignorance of the fact that his father had first written a
play called "Gold" and had then transformed that into the novel; in this
the defendant was enjoined because the version which he produced
infringed the earlier play. In Beere _v._ Ellis in 1889, Baron Pollock
enjoined a rival dramatic version of "As in a looking glass" on the
ground that while bits of dialogue, presumably copied into the
defendant's version, were scarcely substantial, yet a special situation
founded on a new incident not in the novel and certain stage business
connected with the death of the heroine constituted an infringement. In
1890, in Schlesinger _v._ Turner, the executors of Wilkie Collins
obtained an injunction against a rival dramatic version of "The new
Magdalen," the judge holding that although the defendant's version had
not been copied from the author's own play, it was substantially similar
and therefore an infringement. That an independent and different
dramatic version can, however, be made, was specifically held in the
case of Schlesinger _v._ Bedford in the same year, when Collins's
executors failed to obtain an injunction against the defendant's rival
dramatic version of "The woman in white," although the novelist himself
had previously dramatized his work, the judge holding that the two plays
were "essentially different."
{Sidenote: Use of substantial quotations}
But the use in a play of considerable portions of a copyrighted novel
would be an infringement. That a dramatization using substantial parts
of a novel infringes the novel, was definitely established in 1863 in
Tinsley _v._ Lacy, where the proprietor of Miss Braddon's "Lady Audley's
secret" and "Aurora Floyd" obtained an injunction against a bookseller
who sold dramatizations under the same titles of which a quarter or more
of the text was taken bodily from the novels. So in 1888 an injunction
was obtained from Judge Stirling, in Warne _v._ Seebohm, in the Court of
Chancery, against a dramatization of "Little Lord Fauntleroy" which
copied from the novel beyond the limits of fair use and was therefore
considered a "copy" from the work.
{Sidenote: Specific scenes or situations}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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