The Artful Jurist

This weekend I’ll be attending a playwrights’ conference that focuses on self producing one’s own plays. I’m also one of the contributors, my contribution consisting of a hand-out with some general notes on legal issues that confront the playwright who also serves as his own producer. I hope my notes will be useful to those who get them. Although, from a practical standpoint, there’s absolutely no way every conceivable legal issue could be covered in a small hand-out. Nor would a massive treatise be something a group of artists would embrace as particularly useful to them. But a few tips certainly can’t hurt.

One tip that didn’t make the hand-out, but which is a much misunderstood legal issue, is the mythical race to the Registrar of Copyrights. People seem to be under the impression that the first person to register a work with the Copyright Office then owns and controls all rights to that work. Not necessarily so.

In this respect people confuse copyrights with patents. Patents are indeed a race to the registrar. The first person to file for a patent is entitled to it, despite anyone else having come up with the idea first.

Copyright, on the other hand, is not a race to the registrar. Under present American law, a person automatically owns the copyright on a creative work the moment it is put into some tangible medium (like paper, film, video, sound recording, digital file, etc.). So, if you write a book, and someone steals a copy and registers it for a copyright before you do, that dastardly villain does not usurp your copyright. So long as it’s an original work of yours, you own the copyright and you can register it at any time—even if that comes after someone else has tried to claim it for his own.

Naturally, if there’s a dispute over who was the original creator of a work, that’s where it helps to have evidence that demonstrates when you created it. But don’t expect the Copyright Office to step in and make those determinations. That’s typically a matter for the courts.