Bit Parts

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a district court ruling that had been handed down in favor of a compiler of previously uncollected Dorothy Parker films. Silverstein v. Penguin Putnam Inc., 03-7363. In 1994, plaintiff Stuart Silverstein presented to Penguin 122 uncollected Parker poems that he had collected. Penguin instead published its own “Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems” in 1999. Penguin acknowledged that its editor photocopied poems from the book “Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker” that Silverstein had published in 1996. Silverstein argued, among other things, that he had made 600 edits (mostly grammatical) to Parker's poems. Vacating a lower court injunction, the appeals court emphasized that “the right asserted by Silverstein is too slight to support an injunction against publication of the Penguin volume: Silverstein holds no copyright in the poems themselves; Penguin has not used Silverstein's arrangement; and the chief principle of Silverstein's selection ' that the poems previously had not been collected ' reflects an exercise of judgment by Mrs. Parker, not by Silverstein.” But the appeals court also ruled that there are material issues of fact “as to whether Silverstein exercised creativity in selecting the works for his compilation. Those questions must be answered before the creativity, if any, in his selection process can be assessed.”

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