Exit, Pursued by a Lawyer
New York Times
Jan. 29, 2006
Paraphrasing: Are directors engaged in anything akin to authorship protected by copyright? If so, what's to stop them from demanding payment whenever a play they once directed is revived? What would that mean to the free flow of ideas in an art form that borrows heavily from all available sources?
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4 comments:
This has come up in the past, but the incident referenced in the Times article certainly takes the concept of staging-as-intellectual-property to a new level. The argument made by directors such as Harold Clurman is that their staging and blocking of a piece is their copyrighted material - that a production which copies their staging in whole or in part owes them monetary compensation. I think there's some merit to that argument; after all, Directors work hard to develop their staging just as writers work hard to develop their scripts. That being said, I think it's also hard to prove that staging in a particular production is taken explicitly from a previously produced work (that's one of the reasons why this case is such a touchstone - the director was fired from this production, so he can prove that the staging is his. It's a lot harder for New-York-Director-Man to prove that Cleveland-Director-Woman stole his staging and didn't just come up with similar staging by chance).
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Unless you're directing a premiere or something extraordinarily innovative, I wonder how many directors would bother going to the trouble of the annotation necessary to be able to file an eligible copyright request?
Seems like one of those things that sounds good in theory, but hard to put into practice.
i'm not up to writing an essay about my feelings on this matter. it's a great question to ponder though. more food for thought: dance choreography can be copyrighted. here's an interesting article about a court battle regarding balanchine's work:
http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/copyrigh.html
Seems like the wrong approach.
Feels like an extension of the corporate mindset that a) everything can and should be owned and b) I deserve payment and recognition for anything I do.
The artistic equivalent of a corporation declaring it owns the patent to rice? "That intonation was mine! That look downstage - I did that."
Me, me, me. Theatre is a tradition, a collaborative craft. The idea that someone hatches something new out of thin air is questionable at best. Think how many came before, and will come after.
What about striving to anonymously contribute to the greater good? If someone uses what you have created, that is your payment.
Much of copyright law is completely bogus.
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