Evan Hunter - The Paper Dragon

"I assure you, Mr. Brackman, that your integrity is unquestioned," McIntyre said.

"Thank you, your Honor. Thank you, and forgive me for taking the Court's time to clear up this seemingly insignificant matter, but it was important to me."

"I understand."

"Thank you. Mr. Willow has also commented on the scarcity of claimed similarities between Catchpole and The Paper Dragon , pointing out to your Honor that most plagiarism cases will have two hundred, or three hundred, or even four hundred claimed similarities. He also stated that most of these cases were lost by the plaintiff, and I would like to suggest that it was the very weight of the similarities that helped to defeat these claims. When there are so many, your Honor, when every word and every comma becomes a matter for debate, well, obviously the plaintiff is stretching the truth, obviously he is predicating much of his case on sheer imagination. We have not done that here, your Honor. We have claimed only similarities that are plain for all to see. Some of them are less important than others, yes, but they are all pertinent. They are all pertinent because they show that there was copying, and without copying there can be no charge of plagiarism."

"Excuse me one moment, Mr. Brackman," McIntyre said, "but is it your belief that Mr. Driscoll saw this play?"

"Your Honor, I know that Mr. Driscoll is now a highly respected writer, and I know that he has been acclaimed as a literary phenomenon, and I know that his novel is still being dissected in the literary journals and, for all I know, being taught in colleges and universities all across these United States of ours. But, your Honor, he was not highly respected before he wrote The Paper Dragon , he was not being lionized, he was in fact totally unknown. By his own admission, he had written only a few unpublished short stories before writing the novel, and he has written nothing since. The only reason for his reputation now, in fact, is that he stole another man's work."

"Mr. Brackman, do you think he saw the play?"

"I think he was in possession of it."

"Of what? The play?"

"I think he was in possession of the plaintiff's play, yes."

"Before he wrote his novel?"

"Before he wrote his novel, and perhaps while he was writing his novel."

"I see."

"Your Honor, the evidence cannot show otherwise. Mr. Willow took the time and trouble to amass a great deluge of trivia, a landslide of outlines and letters and maps and what-have-you, but what do these prove? If we believe Mr. Driscoll, then indeed all these collected scraps of paper were the result of personal work habits, and show that he was a diligent man with perhaps an eye on future historians, keeping as it were his own personal time capsule for posterity. But if we do not believe Mr. Driscoll, then he was only a clever thief seeking to hide his plagiarism by constructing a supporting body of evidence to substantiate a claim of independent creation."

"I don't wish to interrupt your argument further," McIntyre said, "but I would still like to know whether it is your belief that Mr. Driscoll actually saw this play. A minute ago—"

"I don't understand, your Honor."

"Well, you said you thought he possessed a copy of it."

"Yes."

"Do you think he saw it as well?"

"Do you mean in performance?"

"Yes," McIntyre said. "Do you think he saw the play on the stage?"

"I don't know."

"Very well."

"He says he did not, your Honor, he has testified to that. He has also testified that he never saw a copy of this play until, when was it, several weeks ago, when Mr. Willow gave him one to read. How then can we explain these similarities — and there are, if your Honor please, exactly twenty-six of them, plus of course the six that were found to exist only between the play and the movie. How do we explain twenty-six concrete and specific similarities between the play Catchpole and the novel The Paper Dragon unless Mr. Driscoll had access to this play, unless—"

"Mr. Brackman," McIntyre interrupted, "you said earlier that some of these similarities were less important than others. I would—"

"But all pertinent, your Honor. We've set them forth in our brief, and I think we've covered them extensively over the past several days. I certainly don't want to weary you with them again, unless you wish me to do so."

"I merely wanted to know which ones you consider important."

"They are all important, your Honor, they are all pertinent, including those we concede to be minor. For example, your Honor, we claim that there is a similarity of plot, and then we go on to show exactly how and where the plots are similar, even identical in some places. Well, Mr. Willow in his summation said that a plot cannot be copyrighted, and yet one of the cases Mr. Genitori cites in his brief—"

"Yes, Mr. Brackman, I don't think we need belabor the point. If two works have identical plots, even though 'plot' per se is not copyrightable, this would certainly be evidence of copying. Don't you agree, Mr. Willow?"

"Yes, your Honor, if the plots were identical."

"Or significantly similar," McIntyre said, and then paused. "Or inexplicably so."

"Yes, your Honor," Willow said.

"So let's not belabor the point."

"By the same token, your Honor," Brackman said, "my opponent has gone to great lengths to show that many of the incidents and events and characters, much of the language, the settings and so forth used in the novel are there only because it happens to be a novel about the United States Army. He says, in effect, that any novel about the United States Army, any play about the United States Army would necessarily have sergeants in it, or obscenity, or barracks, or what have you. All right, we concede this. Where there's an army, there are necessarily men in uniform, and there are rifles, and battlefields, and enemy soldiers, and wounded men, and nurses, all right, let us say all of these things are in the public domain. Nonetheless, your Honor, even material in the public domain may be so combined or compiled as to be copyrightable."

"Yes, I know that, Mr. Brackman. But while we're on this point, I'd like to ask another question. Neither you nor Mr. Willow have said a word about the differences between the play and the book, but it strikes me that there are tremendous dissimilarities, and I wonder now whether we shouldn't concern ourselves with these as well. I wonder, in fact, whether we are not dutybound to study these dissimilarities in trying to determine whether there was indeed any copying here."

"If your Honor please," Brackman said, "the plaintiff's b-b-b-burden would be to prove th-that the similarities, and not the dis similarities, are so overwhelming that, your Honor, that there are enough of them to support a claim of plagiarism."

"Yes, but Mr. Willow admitted for the purposes of argument that even if all these alleged similarities were indeed copied, they would still add up to something too insignificant to be called plagiarism. Wasn't that his point?" "I believe that was his point," Brackman said. "Isn't that the point you made, Mr. Willow?" "It was one of my points, yes, your Honor." "Your Honor," Brackman said, "I do not believe any of these similarities are insignificant, nor do I believe someone can be guilty of just a little plagiarism, in much the same way a woman cannot possibly be just a little pregnant. How many of these similarities need we show before we recognize they cannot all be accidental? How else can we hope to prove plagiarism except by putting the works side by side and saying this corresponds to this, and that corresponds to that? Will the thief oblige us by admitting his theft? Of course not. So how else can we prove this theft, your Honor, except by comparing the works, by locating these seemingly unimportant and insignificant similarities, these so-called coincidences scattered throughout the work, and appearing far too often to be called coincidental? How else, your Honor? By inspecting what is dissimilar , as you have suggested? Would this support our claim? No, your Honor. It would only indicate that the work was not copied in its entirety, and that is not what we have claimed, nor is it what we have proved here in this Court. We have only proved that enough of it was copied to significantly deprive the plaintiff of his rights.