## Facts

- Anne Nichols owned the copyright in the 1922 play *Abie’s Irish Rose*, a comedy about a Jewish man who secretly marries an Irish Catholic woman and the conflict and eventual reconciliation between their fathers.
- The play’s conflict centers on religious opposition, deception about the bride’s identity, multiple wedding ceremonies involving a rabbi and a priest, and reconciliation after the couple has twins.
- Universal Pictures produced the 1926 film *The Cohens and the Kellys*, involving neighboring Jewish and Irish families whose children marry amid parental conflict.
- In the film, the parents’ conflict is driven primarily by wealth, poverty, and temperament; religion plays no material role.
- Nichols sued in the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement; the district court dismissed the complaint.
- Nichols appealed to the Second Circuit.

## Issues

1. Whether a film can infringe a play absent literal copying by taking protected non-literal expression such as plot structure, sequence of incidents, and characters.
2. Where to draw the line between unprotectable ideas (general themes and plot premises) and protectable expression in dramatic works.
3. Whether the shared use of familiar character types (e.g., feuding fathers from different communities) constitutes infringement.

## Decision

- The Second Circuit affirmed dismissal for Universal.
- The court held the film did not infringe the play because the commonalities were at a high level of generality and consisted of unprotectable ideas and conventional character types.
- Even assuming the film borrowed some details, the works were sufficiently different in protected expressive elements—events, motivations, and dramatic development—that there was no substantial appropriation.

## Legal Principles

- Copyright protection is not limited to verbatim text; non-literal copying may infringe if what is taken is a substantial part of protected expression.
- As a work is described at increasing levels of generality, protection “thins” and eventually ends; general themes, premises, and plot ideas are not protected.
- Protection may extend to the “pattern” of incidents and detailed characterization, but not to generalized story outlines such as a quarrel between families from different groups whose children marry and whose parents later reconcile.
- Stock characters and conventional types are generally not protectable; only sufficiently delineated, distinctive characters may be protected apart from the plot.
- Substantial similarity is assessed by comparing protectable expressive elements rather than unprotectable ideas, with the line-drawing necessarily case-specific.

## Conclusion

The court held that the shared premise of an Irish–Jewish family conflict culminating in marriage and reconciliation was an unprotectable idea, and that the defendants did not appropriate the play’s protected expressive details; therefore, the film did not infringe the plaintiff’s copyright.


Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 45 F.2d 119 (2d Cir. 1930)