In his suit against playwright Nancy McClernan and producer Jonathan X. Flagg, director Edward Einhorn claims (inter alia) “that his staging contributions to [the play] ‘Tam Lin’ — contributions that his former collaborators say they excised — constitute a copyrighted work of intellectual property, owned by him, and that the defendants must therefore pay for infringing the copyright.” According to the New York Times, the suit raises wider questions of interest to “the famously collaborative process of theater-making”:

Are directors engaged in anything akin to the kind of authorship protected by copyright laws? If so, what’s to stop them from demanding payment whenever a play they once directed is revived? And what would that mean to the free flow of ideas in an art form that borrows heavily from all available sources?

(Jesse Green, New York Times, Jan. 29). P.S. Lattman has more (Jan. 30) including a link to the play’s website.

Unrelatedly, the third in our series of proposed logos is one of several sent in by David Thomasson of Washington, D.C., whose many writing and consulting activities include a dynamite series of editorials on litigation reform in the recently launched newspaper, the Washington Examiner.

Filed under: copyright