Page:Copyright, Its History And Its Law (1912).djvu/205

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DRAMATIC AND MUSICAL
173

first written a play called "Gold" and had then transformed that into the novel; in this the defendant was enjoined because the version which he produced infringed the earlier play. In Beereu. Ellis in 1889, Baron Pollock enjoined a rival dramatic version of "As in a looking glass" on the ground that while bits of dialogue, presumably copied into the defendant's version, were scarcely substantial, yet a special situation founded on a new incident not in the novel and certain stage business connected with the death of the heroine constituted an infringement. In 1890, in Schlesinger v. Turner, the executors of Wilkie Collins obtained an injunction against a rival dramatic version of "The new Magdalen," the judge holding that although the defendant's version had not been copied from the author's own play, it was substantially similar and therefore an infringement. That an independent and different dramatic version can, however, be made, was specifically held in the case of Schlesinger v. Bedford in the same year, when Collins's executors failed to obtain an injunction against the defendant's rival dramatic version of "The woman in white," although the novelist himself had previously dramatized his work, the judge holding that the two plays were "essentially different."

Use of sub-
stantial
quotations
But the use in a play of considerable portions of a copyrighted novel would be an infringement. That a dramatization using substantial parts of a novel infringes the novel, was definitely established in 1863 in Tinsley v. Lacy, where the proprietor of Miss Braddon's "Lady Audley's secret" and "Aurora Floyd" obtained an injunction against a bookseller who sold dramatizations under the same titles of which a quarter or more of the text was taken bodily from the novels. So in 1888 an injunction was obtained from Judge Stirling, in Warne v. Seebohm, in the Court of