The Artful Jurist

A playwright posed a question concerning a script opportunity she was debating.  The opportunity was the chance to have her five-minute play script (recently produced by a theater company) posted in its entirety on the theater company's website.

It's one of those situations where it's nice to get your work out there; but is putting your play's script online in its entirety too out there?  After all, once it's on the web, can't anyone who comes across it just print out the script and perform the play without your even knowing about it?

Well, yes and no.  Yes, someone who has computer access to your script can pretty much do things like print out as many copies as he wants and hand them off to a bunch of people with the intent to produce the play sans permission or royalties to the playwright.  But, no, that someone can't do it legally.  It still amounts to copyright infringement, and, if you get caught doing that, you could end up getting sued.

One of the things that doesn't quite register with people is that the Internet is not a buffet of free intellectual property.  Just because you have access to text, sounds, or images online, it doesn't mean you have carte blanche to do with those things as you will.  Unless that material is in the public domain, it's all protected by copyright.

So the playwright has to weigh the pros of having her script available for others to experience online against the cons of having it just a mouse click away from being unceremoniously swiped by copyright scofflaws around the globe.

'Tis the dilemma of the digital age in which we live.