Doody v. Penguin Group (Usa) Inc.
| Decision Date | 23 November 2009 |
| Docket Number | Civil No. 08-00285 JMS/BMK. |
| Citation | 673 F.Supp.2d 1144 |
| Parties | Louis DOODY, Plaintiff, v. PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC., a Delaware corporation; Sandecker, RLLP, a Colorado Limited Liability Limited Partnership; Clive Cussler; Dirk Cussler; John Does 1-10, Jane Does 1-10; Doe Corporations 1-10; Does Partnerships 1-10; and Doe Associations 1-10, Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Hawaii |
Dana R. Lyons, J. Stephen Street, Reginauld T. Harris, Rush Moore LLP A Limited Liability Law Partnership, Honolulu, HI, for Plaintiff.
Barbara J. Kirschenbaum, Chad P. Love, Chuck T. Narikiyo, Love & Kirschenbaum, LLLC, Honolulu, HI, for Defendant.
ORDER GRANTING DEFENDANTS' MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT
In 2003, Plaintiff Louis Doody ("Plaintiff") sent a manuscript of his copyrighted fictional novel Gold of the Khan to Defendant Penguin Group (USA) Inc. ("Penguin") for its consideration. The manuscript tells the story of a Boston history professor, Marya Bradwell, who searches for and finds Marco Polo's lost treasure hidden in a church in Croatia. Penguin ultimately rejected Plaintiff's manuscript, but Plaintiff contends that protected elements of his manuscript were copied and incorporated into several action adventure novels written by best-selling authors Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler including Treasure of Khan, Trojan Odyssey, Golden Buddha, The Navigator, and Lost City (collectively, the "Cussler Books"). Plaintiff therefore alleges claims against Defendants Penguin, Sandecker RLLP, Clive Cussler, and Dirk Cussler (collectively "Defendants") for copyright infringement, conversion, unfair and deceptive trade practices, and breach of implied contract.
Currently before the court is Defendants' Motion for Summary Judgment, in which they argue that the copyright infringement claim should be dismissed because Gold of the Khan and the Cussler Books are not similar in any of their protected elements, and the state law claims should be dismissed because they are preempted by federal law and otherwise lack merit. Based on the following, the court GRANTS Defendants' Motion for Summary Judgment.
Plaintiff, a retired high school teacher, drafted Gold of the Khan during the summer of 2002 to February 2003. Pl.'s Decl. ¶ 5. Plaintiff subsequently attempted to get Gold of the Khan published and first registered it with the United States Copyright Office. Id. ¶¶ 6, 8-9; Pl.'s Ex. 7. Plaintiff then submitted a synopsis of Gold of the Khan to Topaz, a division of Penguin, in response to a solicitation inviting writers to submit synopses of "historical titles." Pl.'s Decl. ¶ 6; Pl.'s Ex. 6.
In response to Plaintiff's synopsis, Penguin requested and Plaintiff provided the entire manuscript of Gold of the Khan in both hard copy and compact disc form. See Defs.' Ex. B. In a May 21, 2003 letter, editorial assistant Rose Hilliard rejected Gold of the Khan for publication. Pl.'s Ex. 8. While she enjoyed the story, Hilliard found the plot of Gold of the Khan uneven and weighed down by contemporary Asian politics, the dialogue stilted, and the characters lacking in clear motivations. Id. Hilliard offered, however, to read a revised version and Plaintiff submitted a new version in August 2003. Pl.'s Decl. ¶ 14; Defs.' Ex. C.
In a February 9, 2004 letter, Hilliard again rejected Gold of the Khan. Hilliard stated that while she requested "a few reads on this when the manuscript first came in, [] the general consensus was that Marco Polo wasn't a big enough draw for the soft historical fiction market."1 Pl.'s Ex. 9. Plaintiff never received his compact disc back, and never heard anything more from Penguin. Pl.'s Decl. ¶ 17. In 2006, Plaintiff saw Treasure of Khan in a bookstore and believes that it, along with the other Cussler Books, have substantial similarities to Gold of the Khan. Id. ¶ 18.
Clive Cussler, one of the authors of the Cussler Books, is a famous adventure novelist who has written over 17 books that have reached the New York Times fiction best-seller list. Given his volume of books, Clive Cussler has admitted that it is "getting harder" to come up with ideas and maintain originality between books. See Pl.'s Exs. 4, 5. Clive Cussler, his fellow authors, and his editors all deny, however, that they received or reviewed Gold of the Khan at any time prior to this lawsuit. See Defs.' Exs. O, P, Q, R.
In Plaintiff's Gold of the Khan, Dr. Marya Bradwell, a Massachusetts professor in Asian History, fulfills her lifelong pursuit of finding Marco Polo's lost treasure and in the process, falls in love with antiquities dealer Liam Di Angelo.2
Bradwell always believed that Marco Polo had brought back treasure from his adventures advising Kublai Khan, including the "Tablets of Command," golden tablets Kublai Khan gave Marco Polo to secure his safe passage back to Italy. Bradwell's theory gets jump-started when her research assistant in Italy, Vittoria, finds a letter from Marco Polo's confessor stating that he gave Marco Polo's journal to one of Marco Polo's daughters, and finds the journal in a convent in Venice. Bradwell has no funding because her department does not believe that her theories have merit, but her colleague Dr. Argawal offers financial support in exchange for being kept apprised of her progress. Bradwell accepts his offer and heads off to follow the clues in the journal to find the Tablets of Command.
On her way to Italy, Bradwell meets and has several awkward encounters with Di Angelo. While their chemistry cannot be denied, Bradwell does not like Di Angelo's willingness to support tomb raiders for fast money. Bradwell accepts his offers of help, however, after she learns that Vittoria was attacked, is later chased herself, and finds her room ransacked. Di Angelo takes Bradwell to the Bellardos, his source of antiquities in Venice, and also steals Marco Polo's journal out of the convent for her. The journal reveals that Marco Polo made a large donation to a church in Korcula, Croatia, so Bradwell and Di Angelo head there together.
In Korcula, Bradwell's search for the Tablets of Command is derailed when she is kidnapped and spirited away to a palace in Kashgar, located in Western China. There, Bradwell meets "the Khan," a drug lord bent on having the Tablets of Command and uniting all of Central Asia, and who is helped by none other than Argawal. Argawal and the Khan threaten Bradwell that she must help them or die.
In the meantime, Di Angelo returns to Venice and gets help from the Bellardos to save Bradwell. They devise a plan to lure Bradwell's captors with Scythian artifacts that the Khan has been purchasing and to offer to trade Bradwell for the journal. Their plan works, and to Bradwell's delight, Di Angelo uses only a copy of the journal for the switch.
Bradwell and Di Angelo return to Korcula, where Bradwell realizes that the Tablets of Command are hidden in the cross in the belltower of St. Mark's church, and the remaining treasure is hidden in a mural depicting Marco Polo and a Chinese princess he fell in love with. Bradwell and Di Angelo scale the tower to reveal the Tablets of Command and are confronted by Argawal, who falls to his death. In the end, Marco Polo's treasures are put on display for the world to see, Bradwell becomes a media sensation, and Di Angelo proposes marriage.
All of the Cussler Books at issue involve high-stakes, fast-paced action adventure in the vein of James Bond, MacGyver, Indiana Jones, and Mission Impossible, but with a focus on technology and the ocean. All of Cussler's main characters are similar in that they manage to overcome even the most dire of life-threatening situations using their tenacity and ingenuity with witticism and aplomb. Except for Golden Buddha, all of the Cussler Books at issue involve characters that work for the fictional government agency the National Underwater and Marine Agency ("NUMA"), an oceanic research and investigation organization. Both Treasure of Khan and The Navigator follow Dirk Pitt and his sidekick Al Giordano, the Navigator and Lost City follow Kurt Austin and his sidekick Joe Zavala, and Golden Buddha follows Juan Cabrillo, a chairman of an elite team of mercenaries housed in a high-tech boat. All of these books also follow a familiar pattern of providing a prologue of some event in the past, which ties to the events in the present.
In Treasure of Khan, published in 2006 and written by Clive and Dirk Cussler, Pitt and Giordano foil an evil plot by a Mongolian oil tycoon to disrupt the world's oil supplies and along the way discover the tombs of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan.
In the prologue, in 1291, a Mongolian commander finds what the reader later learns to be Hawaii, and in 1937, an archeologist finds and quickly loses a map to Genghis Khan's tomb and a cheetah skin. In the present time, Pitt and Giordano meet a team of oil surveyors after they save the surveyors from a seiche wave on Lake Baikal, Siberia. While the surveyors are with Pitt and Giordano, Tolgio Borjin, president of a Mongolian oil company, manages to have the oil surveyors kidnapped and taken to his palace in Mongolia, where they are forced to identify drilling locations on unmarked maps. Borjin's plan is to disrupt the world's oil supply by using a machine that generates earthquakes and to take over hidden oil reserves in the former Inner Mongolia by forcing China to cede the former Inner Mongolia back to Mongolia in exchange for Borjin's agreement to supply China all of its oil needs at market price. Borjin has funded his plan by selling artifacts from Genghis Khan's tomb, which he found and keeps secretly at his palace.
Pitt and Giordano go...
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