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THE STOLEN STORY 135 You send your story to a studio and it comes back. Presently you find that the company has released or is about to release a story identical with your own. You are certain that it is your own and you talk wildly about suits and all that sort of thing. It may be that an Editor, having to write a story a week as part of his contract has remembered, consciously or sub-consciously, the idea of your story, but it is far more likely that the Editor found a script he liked and put it in work. It is possible that you and the author of this second story both derived inspiration from the same source and that the other did his work in better fashion. His story was taken because of its development where yours was passed over and forgotten. We have seen in a single week's batch of stories three to five scripts so nearly alike that they might all have been copied from a common source. More than that, per- haps two or three more came in the next week and the next. If any one of these stories had been purchased, possibly fifty other authors would have cried that they had been robbed. They make no allowance for the fact that the idea is commonplace and likely to suggest itself to anyone. They know only that their story is just like that on the screen except a few scenes where the Editor had fixed it up. And that it just where the answer lies. The "fixing up" was done to the same idea by another author more careful or more experienced and his idea sold on that fixing up. A farcical story was written and sent direct to a producer in the field nearly a thousand miles from the studio, the work being done by a writer a hundred miles from the home office. The story was produced and immediately another writer declared that she had been robbed as she had sent that story to the studio some time before. Investigation showed that she had sent such a story in after the director had gone south. There was no possi- bility by which the other author or the director could have seen this script, and the fact was explained to her, but immediately she amended her complaint to add the charge that her idea had been sent the other author, who really had worked over one of his old fiction stories written and published about eight years previously. Take another case. A scene from the Solax Spry Spinsters in which a spite fence was introduced suggested to a writer a story written wholly about a spite fence. The result was an almost perfect reproduction of Vitagraph's Suing Susan. Had the story been made it would have looked suspicious, to say the least, but a vigilant editor caught it in time. It is inconceivable that of the thousands of scripts turned out yearly by authors many of whom are not practised hands at plot devising, there should not be much duplication of idea. It may