Can You Copyright Stage Direction?

An ongoing legal dispute between a New York director and the theatre he was working for could wind up having wide implications for the theatre world at large. The director, who was fired after disputes with the producer and the playwright, “claims in his complaint that his staging contributions… constitute a copyrighted work of intellectual property, owned by him, and that the defendants must therefore pay for infringing the copyright,” since the show went on after the director was let go.