## Facts

- Robert Stodart wrote a dramatic play and properly registered it for federal copyright protection.
- Mutual Film Corporation and another motion-picture company produced and distributed a film.
- Stodart alleged the film’s story tracked his play so closely that it reproduced the play’s plot in substance.
- The alleged similarities included the same setting, principal characters, and a substantially identical progression of specific events and scenes.
- The film companies denied infringement and argued, in substance, that Stodart’s play was itself only minimally different from earlier stories and situations that were already in circulation and therefore in the public domain.
- The case was heard in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York before District Judge Learned Hand.

## Issues

1. Whether a motion picture infringes a copyrighted play when it uses a virtually identical plot, including the same characters, setting, and specific sequence of events.
2. Whether defendants avoid liability by arguing that the plaintiff’s play borrows from earlier, public-domain stories, so the plaintiff’s plot is free for all to use.

## Decision

- The court held that the defendants’ film infringed Stodart’s copyrighted play.
- The court rejected the public-domain defense as applied to the defendants’ work, reasoning that the defendants had taken Stodart’s protected expression—his particular selection and ordering of incidents—rather than merely using a general story idea.
- The court treated the close tracking of Stodart’s concrete dramatic arrangement (not just a shared theme) as sufficient to establish infringement on the record before it.

## Legal Principles

- Copyright in a dramatic work is not confined to verbatim dialogue; it can reach the author’s protectable dramatic expression, including the particular sequence and arrangement of scenes and incidents.
- Similarity at the level of general theme, premise, or stock situation does not establish infringement; infringement turns on taking the plaintiff’s expressive choices as shown in the concrete structure of the work.
- The presence of earlier, public-domain materials with related ideas does not excuse copying of a later author’s original contribution; the defendant must show that what it took was already found in the prior sources in substantially the same form.
- When the defendant’s work follows the plaintiff’s plot more closely than the plaintiff’s work follows any asserted prior sources, that supports a finding that the defendant copied the plaintiff’s expression rather than drawing independently from the public domain.
- The scope of protection is limited to the author’s original contribution, but that contribution may include a particular combination of otherwise familiar elements when the combination is expressed through specific dramatic incidents and ordering.

## Conclusion

In *Stodart v. Mutual Film Corp.*, Judge Learned Hand concluded that the defendants’ motion picture infringed Stodart’s copyrighted play because the film replicated the play’s concrete plot structure—its setting, characters, and specific sequence of events—and the defendants could not avoid liability by pointing to generalized similarities between Stodart’s play and earlier public-domain stories.


Stodart v. Mutual Film Corp., 249 F. 507 (1917)