Huie v. National Broadcasting Company
| Decision Date | 25 March 1960 |
| Citation | 184 F. Supp. 198 |
| Parties | William Bradford HUIE, Plaintiff, v. NATIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANY, Inc., Purex Corporation Ltd., Meree Miller, Robert Alan Aurthur, John Frankenheimer and Alex March, Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York |
Satterlee, Warfield & Stephens, New York City, for plaintiff.
Coudert Brothers, New York City, for defendants.
Plaintiff moves for a preliminary injunction against the presentation the day after tomorrow night of a television show entitled "The American". Plaintiff claims that that presentation would constitute an infringement of his copyright on a story entitled "The Hero of Iwo Jima" published by him in a volume entitled "Wolf Whistle" in 1959.
Each of these productions has for its central character Ira Hamilton Hayes, a Pima Indian who was one of the marines photographed by the press photographer Joe Rosenthal in his celebrated picture of the raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi. The photograph was a staged photograph but was used in a Government bond drive as a picture of action in actual combat and three of the soldiers shown in the picture were acclaimed as heroes throughout the country. One of these three was Ira Hayes. Each production deals with the tragedy involved in his identification with an heroic episode in which he had no part and his deterioration to an ultimate drunkard's death. The individual defendant read plaintiff's story and says that, after considering its use as a basis for a television script, he abandoned the idea. Thereafter he submitted to the National Broadcasting Company a television script dealing with the life of Ira Hayes. In November 1959 it became known that the National Broadcasting Company was working on the presentation of defendant Miller's script. When plaintiff learned of this he notified defendants of his claims to rights based on copyright of his story. Thereafter the TV script was worked over by defendants or some of them until the present final script was arrived at.
On the argument of this motion there has been submitted the penultimate script and the changes made between that and the final indicate the elimination of a number of verbal similarities between the plaintiff's story and the TV script. I conclude from this that the TV script has been prepared with great care to avoid infringement of plaintiff's copyright. Naturally, the questions presented after work of this sort, presumably under the advice of extremely competent counsel, are of great difficulty.
The similarity of the two works is obvious. Defendants meet this stubborn fact head on with the statement that what was taken from plaintiff's story was little more than the historical facts of a man's life. Plaintiff counters with a demonstration that several of the episodes which appear in both works are the products of his imagination and thus may not be classed as historical facts. Defendants' reply to this is that plaintiff represented his story to be a true story and that he is estopped to say that the episodes are not historical.
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