Opinion ID: 755387
Heading Depth: 6
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Billing

Text: 38 In discerning how parties viewed themselves in relation to a work, Childress also deemed the way in which the parties bill or credit themselves to be significant. See 945 F.2d at 508 (Though 'billing' or 'credit' is not decisive in all cases ... consideration of the topic helpfully serves to focus the fact-finder's attention on how the parties implicitly regarded their undertaking.). As the district court noted, billing or credit is ... a window on the mind of the party who is responsible for giving the billing or the credit. And a writer's attribution of the work to herself alone is persuasive proof ... that she intended this particular piece to represent her own individual authorship and is prima facie proof that [the] work was not intended to be joint. Weissmann, 868 F.2d at 1320. 39 Thomson claims that Larson's decision to credit her as dramaturg on the final page of Rent scripts reflected some co-authorship intent. 23 Thomson concedes that she never sought equal billing with Larson, but argues that she did not need to do so in order to be deemed a statutory co-author. 40 The district court found, instead, that the billing was unequivocal: Every script brought to [the court's] attention says Rent, by Jonathan Larson. 24 In addition, Larson described himself in the biography he submitted for the playbill in January 1996, nine days before he died, as the author/composer, and listed Ms. Thomson on the same document as dramaturg. And while, as Ms. Thomson argues, it may indeed have been highly unusual for an author/composer to credit his dramaturg with a byline, we fail to see how Larson's decision to style her as dramaturg on the final page in Rent scripts reflects a co-authorship intent on the part of Larson. The district court properly concluded that the manner in which [Larson] listed credits on the scripts strongly supports the view that he regarded himself as the sole author. 41