Copyright Case Moves On

Today was supposed to be the day a federal court hearing was to be held in the Dorothy Parker copyright case, but due to the horrific acts in New York and D.C. yesterday, we don't know if this is going to happen.

We first reported this in April, concerning Stuart Silverstein's lawsuit against Penguin Putnam. In the Sept. 8 London Daily Telegraph "flyleaf" column on the UK publishing industry by Sam Leith, a brief was published:

PENGUIN PUTNAM is being sued in the States for copyright infringement, in a case whose result could have very interesting implications. In 1994, Stuart Silverstein offered Penguin a compilation he had made and edited of Dorothy Parker's uncollected poems. Penguin didn't want to publish it as a stand-alone, but offered him $2,000 to use it in a Complete Poems it proposed to publish. Silverstein instead went to Scribner, who published it with his introduction in 1996 as Not Much Fun: the Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker.

Then, the problem: three years later the Penguin Complete Poems appeared, whose section "Poems Uncollected by Parker", Silverstein alleges, is copied "comma by comma" from his own work, without acknowledgement. At issue isn't copyright on the poems themselves, but on Silverstein's work as a compiler, editor and rooter-out of lost poems. Penguin has since conceded that Silverstein's collection was "a source", but says its editor arranged the poems in a different order and removed one that Silverstein had included in error. It claims that Silverstein's "sweat of brow" in finding the poems isn't protected by copyright.

It's hard to escape the impression that Penguin are being less than gentlemanly, but a hearing in New York on September 12 will establish whether or not they are legally in the right.

To read about the court documents that were filed, and to read some of Mrs. Parker's work as it originally appeared long ago, click here. To read an excellent Wall Street Journal article on the case, click here to read the story.

Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Wednesday, September 12, 2001 at 10:47 PM | Permalink