Fuller v. Bemis

50 F. 924

• Court: U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Southern New York
• Decided: June 18, 1892
• Status: Published

Opinion

Lacombe, Circuit Judge.

Whatever may be the language of the opinion in Daly v. Palmer, 6 Blatchf. 264, the decision is not authority for the proposition that complainant’s performance is a dramatic composition, within the meaning of the copyright act. It is essential to such a composition that it should tell some story. The plot may be simple. It may be but the narrative or representation of a single transaction; but it must repeat or mimic some action, speech, emotion, passion, or character, real or imaginary. And when it does, it is the ideas thus expressed which become subject of copyright. An examination-of the description of complainant’s dance, as filed for copyright, shows that the end sought for and accomplished was solely the devising of a series of graceful movements, combined with an attractive arrangement of drapery, lights, and shadows, telling no story, portraying no character, depicting no emotion. The merely mechanical movements by which effects are produced on the stage are not subjects of copyright where they convey no ideas whose arrangement makes up a dramatic composition. Surely, those described and practiced here convey, and were devised to convey, to the spectator, no other idea than that a comely woman is illustrating the poetry of motion in a singularly graceful fashion. Such an idea may be pleasing, but it can hardly be called dramatic. Motion for preliminary injunction denied.