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THE SCREEN WRITER
fee, not against writers, but against the lessors who obtain the material. If we assume this is 1 % of the purchase price, and that it handles $25,000,000 worth of materials a year, its revenue would be $250,000, and for the first time the writer would have funds to take up certain matters that cry for attention.
First, there is the matter of a new copyright law, the present one being full of holes and flaws, its provisions not even extending to the radio, television, or the talking picture. Next there is the matter of a regularly maintained lobby in Washington, and of periodic lobbies in Sacramento, Springfield, and Albany, these being the places where most legislation affecting him is passed. Next, there is the matter of vigorous, aggressive prosecution of the writers’ collective case in the courts, which would involve a discontinuation, on the part of the Authority, of the guilds’ general policy of avoiding lawsuits if they can. The Authority, to be effective, must expect lawsuits, not only those brought against it, but those it will bring against the great corporate conspiracies noted above. The opportunity for improvement of the writer’s status in this direction is prodigious. To advert, once more, to the decision in the Goldsmith case: if a copyright is not separable, as Judge Chase says, and there is no “sale” when picture rights are disposed of, what about these “rights” that picture companies, radio studios, magazines, and book publishers are sitting on? Do they exist? Have these somewhat predatory interests, in their eagerness to rook the writer, built up a vast structure made of shadows, that can be made to vanish with smart legal action, and leave the writer once more with the properties he was so shamefully stripped of? Who knows?
Courts, like Talleyrand, usually feel it their duty to take sides with the strong in their struggle with the weak, but if there is so much as 1 % of a chance that this vast victory can be won, we certainly should have the means, in sufficiently big dimension, to fight for it.
And finally there is the matter of the individual writer’s case when he is the victim of infringement. The point here is that the Authority would itself be the holder of copyright, and would come in as the plain¬ tiff, and not merely appear as amicus curiae, as the Authors’ League did in the Goldsmith case; so that instead of a tiny, forlorn, ineffectual suit brought by one lone writer, a smashing, relentless legal action would be
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