It used to be that there were constantly stories about copyright owners going after kids who had downloaded music and video or sampled/excerpted parts of works and represented it as their own. We would hear about companies tracking stuff on computers and going after the owners.
You don’t hear these sort of stories as much any more. Since many of the copyright owners were big corporations, perhaps they figured there was a lot of bad P.R. associated with their efforts.
Or maybe they felt like there was too much of the activity going on that it was fruitless to try to catch everyone and try to stop it.
I know that a lot of performing arts companies have taken liberties with the shows they produce, assuming that the country is so big and their organization so small that no one will bother to check up on them.
Well thanks to technology, it is apparently getting easier for performance rights holders to monitor production activity. Or at least technology is making us more aware that the rights holders are checking on and catching people.
A recent You’ve Cott Mail brought attention to a couple cease and desist letters issued last week due to unauthorized script changes.
An article about a Milwaukee production of David Mamet’s Olenna implies they got caught making their unauthorized change when a review of the show appeared online.
As first reported by Howard Sherman, Hands on a Hardbody show creators actually attended a performance in Texas and noticed the show wasn’t the one they created. A number of actions were subsequently taken by the Dramatists Guild and Samuel French, Inc, which appear in updates on Sherman’s post.
These aren’t isolated incidents. Howard Sherman has been keeping an eye on these issues and addressing them on his blog. Back in January, he discussed the Asolo Repertory Theater having to postpone their opening when they got caught rewriting Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come! [Disclosure: I worked for the Florida State University side of the Asolo about 20 years ago.]
Sherman also covered a Long Island* high school making unauthorized alterations to the school edition of Rent
There are a lot of issues connected with artistic freedom, color blind casting, community standards and the comparative attitudes of material creators toward their works that factor into these stories. Most are addressed in the dozens of comments on Sherman’s posts. They are a good place to start if you aren’t familiar with the basic, but common, issues related to the stage.
While the performance licenses are pretty explicit about what you can and can’t do, the conversation about intellectual property is always evolving so it is definitely something to keep an eye on.
Not to mention that if you have been flaunting the conditions of your license assuming that you won’t get caught, it may be time to reassess that belief.
*I mistakenly misidentified the school involved with Rent as being in CT. Thanks to Howard Sherman for bringing the mistake to my attention