The Artful Jurist

The latest Dramatists Guild of America e-newsletter has a report about a community theater company that was of the opinion that it didn’t need to pay royalties for any play that’s not yet published.

Now where in the world did this theater company get this cockamamie notion? (The Dramatists Guild was wondering the same thing and, I hope, has set that company straight.)

For the benefit of that theater company (or any other company with similar ideas), copyright law is not restricted to published material. In fact, under the current American law that took effect in 1978, copyright protection applies immediately the moment a creative work is preserved in some sort of tangible format, whether that format be paper, film, recordings, digital media, what have you. A play isn’t free for the taking just because Samuel French hasn’t bought up the rights to make a little booklet out of it.

I’m only guessing, but perhaps some theater companies believe that they shouldn’t have to pay for an unpublished play because the authors of these lesser known works should just be ever so grateful to them that they’re actually producing the play, and the playwright having the audacity to ask for any money would simply be an act of ingratitude. Again, I’m just hypothesizing here. But one has to wonder what goes through an artistic director’s mind when he tells a playwright, “Oh, we never pay for plays by local authors.” I actually had an artistic director tell me that after I had made repeated requests for the royalties I was due for a play of mine the company had produced.

In fact, this artistic director told me that the company had produced many plays by local playwrights but never paid a one of them. It was their policy. Oh, really? Can you say “statutory damages”? By statute, the minimum damages for an unauthorized performance would be seven hundred fifty dollars. That’s $750 per performance. After I, in so many words, basically asked this artistic director if he’d like to repeat the company’s policy for a judge, the company somehow found the few bucks I was due and paid up.

Yes, it’s sad when it has to come down to threatening litigation. But sometimes you’ve just got to educate people about an author’s legal rights. We do have them, you know—published or not.