Court Opinion

ID: 9651216
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:10:28.358398+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:30.847850
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I fear that an expression by this court of a preference for full and formal trial of plagiarism issues in Dellar v. Samuel Goldwyn, Inc., 2 Cir., 104 F.2d 661, 662 — though the actual decision there supported the result reached below here1 — is now being pressed into a rule of decision for this Circuit, which, with deference, I must conclude is as contrary to the provisions, as well as the spirit, of the new civil rules as it is admittedly opposed to the realities of authorship and of literary thievery. Procedure should be viewed simply as a means of doing justice, not as an end in itself or as something which requires vindication without respect to results; and the new rules were designed to afford not'only speedy and efficient adjudication of actions on the merits, but also, wherever fair and possible, disposition of cases without *702the time and expense of trial. Of course, the common-law demurrer, too, was devised as a means of avoiding an unnecessary formal trial. Nevertheless, since it attacked only the statement found in the pleadings, it tended to exaggerate the importance of technical allegations which might conceal the merits. The civil rules, therefore, are insistent that the merits be brought out and that the pleadings themselves be kept properly subordinated to that necessity. That objective can, however, be achieved without undue insistence upon formal trials. Hence the rules, unlike all earlier procedural systems in this country or England, make the remedy of summary judgment available for all — not a selected few — civil actions,2 with the obvious intent that the screening out of cases not appropriate for such disposition should be made by the parties and the trial judge in the light of the particular circumstances, rather than pursuant to an arbitrary general fiat.3 Moreover, we in common with other circuits have interpreted Rules 12(b) and (c), read in connection with Rules 6(d), 43(e), and 56(e), as freely permitting the use of affidavits to make sure the real issues are before the court, just as Rule 56 itself allows summary judgment on the pleadings alone if the parties choose — a fair, desirable, and rational interpretation of the rules, which is made quite explicit in certain of the pending proposed amendments to the rules. Preliminary Draft of Proposed Amendments to Rules of Civil Procedure, May, 1944, pp. 17-25, 65-69, with notes and cases therein cited.
In short, plaintiff here had just as free choice as defendants whether to rely upon the pleadings and the literary products here in dispute which accompany them or to give more extensive information to the court. Since she chose to rest upon a purely formal allegation of copying, with no specification of actual access, an allegation which stands denied by the defendant book publisher’s answer (the author not having been served or appearing), I think it is lifting one’s self '.by one’s bootstraps — and in the wrong direction at that. — to talk in terms of the old “admission by demurrer” and to say that copying here stands conceded. Actually we know it is not conceded; that issue is not now before us, and we should not consider it or bolster up our decision either way by reference to it. We should bear in mind, too, that the real issue now before us, illegal similarity of the writings, is in no sense a merely formal one presented only by the pleadings, but is necessarily the ultimate issue on the merits involving a comparison of the writings themselves.
Confining myself, therefore, to this issue, for my part I must consider it as bordering rather on the fantastic, as implying callousness towards, if not derision of, real literary talent and skill, to suggest that such trifling and coincidental similarities as a microscopic examination of the two books is thought to bring out here be considered to weigh at all against the sharp differences between them in all matters which really should count — viz., in intended objective and type of reader appeal, in fashioning of the plot and in its progression, in the conception and delineation of characters, in the climax of the story and denouement of the plot, and -in the ¡effectiveness and, certainly in part at least, in the literary skill with which the chosen objective is reached. And as to the plaintiff’s earlier magazine story, that alone is hardly claimed to have been copied, as obviously it was not. In a manifest desire to state the case most fairly, Judge Bondy emphasized everything which could be said for the plaintiff — a process of selection which results in a perspective quite overfavorable to the plaintiff’s claims. Even on his statement, however, I think the dissimilarity too obvious and too controlling to be disregarded, and our duty to reject the suggestion of theft as plain.
On the one hand, we have an attempted psychoanalytical study (in not too successful imitation of a recent vogue in novels) of a young girl through her childhood and down through her unsuccessful marriage to an older man previously married; as might *703be expected, the biography merely runs on without climax until the book closes sometime after the husband has died and as the heroine seemingly contemplates return to an earlier love. On the other hand, we have a superbly fashioned melodrama— told, it is true, by a second wife — of suspense and horror cleverly combined, wherein the hero’s first wife is the villain and the denouement is sharp and unusual, leading directly to the close of the book, with the hero and heroine having lost their home in flames, but obviously about to live happily ever after. Second marriages are too common to erect so large a claim on so small a foundation. I believe the courts do a disservice to literature to encourage the harassment which such a trial means, with its obvious tendency to force settlement of the claim not because it is just, but because contesting it has become too costly or too inconvenient. Here we now compel this publisher to seek at least affidavits— and, to be quite safe, formal depositions— from witnesses as widely separated as England and Hollywood, California, with all the difficulties of present-day communication and travel, in order to reach an end which we confidently foresee and can quite as surely reach right now as later. I regret to see such a failure of procedural resources of the court, particularly when, as it seems to me, the intent of the procedural rules is quite to the contrary.

 In this case — as well as in Collins v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 2 Cir., 106 F.2d 83 — the court held itself “in entire accord with the judge’s finding that, even though the defendants took from this play all those matters in which the film resembles it, they were within their rights in doing so.” What these cases were sent back for was decision of another issue, namely, whether the “continuity” or scenario of the movie presented in the record was actually a reasonably fair synopsis of the film.

 3 Moore’s Federal Practice 3174, 3177; Clark, Summary Judgments, A. B. A. Jud. Adm. Monographs, Ser. A, No. 5.

 Not only because of this, but also because our own recent experience shows by actual count more cases disposed of by the decisive test of comparison of the two texts than by any other means, I do not feel justified in joining in the preference expressed in the Dellar case for the method of adjudication by formal trial. But I would not go to the opposite extreme of saying that adjudication on motion is generally desirable; for to me our experience actually demonstrates what the rules envisage, namely, that the particular circumstances of each case must control and that general admonitions are not to be relied upon.