Speaker 1: Sometimes jokes can be no laughing matter. Conan O'Brien is
Speaker 1: not laughing over a one million dollar lawsuit claiming he
Speaker 1: stole jokes for a monologue from a professional joke writer's
Speaker 1: blog and Twitter feed. O'Brien and his staff have denied
Speaker 1: any theft, but a judge is rule that O'Brien will
Speaker 1: have to go to trial over the allegations that he
Speaker 1: and his staff stole jokes about Caitlyn Jenner, Tom Brady,
Speaker 1: and the Washington Monument from Robert Alex Casberg. Our guest
Speaker 1: is prominent intellectual property litigator Terence ross a partner Captain
Speaker 1: Nuchen Rosamund Terry. I haven't heard much about copyright trials
Speaker 1: over jokes. Are they unusual? Very unusual? June. You know,
Speaker 1: the sort of uh comedy theft has been going on
Speaker 1: since at least the turn of the century, during vaudeville times.
Speaker 1: Wikipedia even has an entire page dedicated to joke thefts.
Speaker 1: But during a period of time, say the forties, the fifties,
Speaker 1: the sixties, the comedy business sort of developed a self
Speaker 1: regulatory scheme. If a comedian thought that his or her
Speaker 1: joke was being stolen and used by another comedian did
Speaker 1: simply tell everybody in the industry that that was going on,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, those accused joke thiefs would
Speaker 1: find themselves not being booked at the nightclubs and key
Speaker 1: venues around the country. Now, as stand up comedy sort
Speaker 1: of expanded onto cable and became a really big money
Speaker 1: maker in the eighties, we saw a resurgence of joke
Speaker 1: thiefs and joke thefts, and suddenly people taking the problem
Speaker 1: much more seriously. And of course it saved a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of money in court costs not to
Speaker 1: have to go to court about it. But the judge
Speaker 1: in this case said the jokes were entitled to thin
Speaker 1: copyright protection. What does that mean, Well, we have a
Speaker 1: as part of our copyright system, this this concept that
Speaker 1: UH certain expressions facts, you know, the sun rises in
Speaker 1: the east, for example, UM, cannot be copyrighted or they
Speaker 1: have very thin copyright protection so that you have to
Speaker 1: take the exact expression of the idea. And so the
Speaker 1: judge was suggesting UM in her decision allowing this case
Speaker 1: to go to trial against uh Conan, that UM the
Speaker 1: jokes had to really be very close to each other,
Speaker 1: that the joke be as written by the plaintiff and
Speaker 1: then as used on the television show Conan had to
Speaker 1: be virtually identical or at least so close that people
Speaker 1: couldn't be confused as to the source. And that's what
Speaker 1: she meant by the judge meant by thin copyright protection.
Speaker 1: So she allowed three of the jokes to go to trial,
Speaker 1: and she threw two of them out. And I have
Speaker 1: to say that these are very they're like almost they're
Speaker 1: like two liner jokes. They're not you know, long and
Speaker 1: involved jokes. So, um, why did she decide to allow
Speaker 1: to throw two of them out? Well, at least one case,
Speaker 1: there was electronic evidence that the staff writer at the
Speaker 1: Conan show UM may have actually written the joke that
Speaker 1: was used on the television show before it would have
Speaker 1: been possible for the staff writer to access it on
Speaker 1: the Internet from the plaintiff. And that's the great thing
Speaker 1: about um E communications nowadays is that you often have
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence that wasn't previously available as to
Speaker 1: exactly when certain jokes were written or got propagated onto
Speaker 1: out there, and so you can match up whether not
Speaker 1: a particular joke was taken after it was written or
Speaker 1: whether it was independently created prior to the plaintiff putting
Speaker 1: it out there for the rest of the world. So Terry,
Speaker 1: doesn't that show that the jokes can be similar enough,
Speaker 1: especially since they don't have to be identical, that two
Speaker 1: people can come to the same joke. Absolutely, and the
Speaker 1: law recognizes the concept of independent creation, that two different
Speaker 1: people can come up with the uh same or similar
Speaker 1: expressions of an idea, because that's what this is all about.
Speaker 1: It's not the idea of a specific joke that is copyrightable,
Speaker 1: it's how you express the joke. Now. The one thing
Speaker 1: the court did not consider here, and I thought they would,
Speaker 1: is that a doctor and copyright law known as the
Speaker 1: merger doctrine, which says that sometimes an idea has so
Speaker 1: few ways of being expressed that it can't be copyright
Speaker 1: in the first place. The chicken crossing the road jokes
Speaker 1: UM sort of fit into that category. And for a
Speaker 1: couple of these jokes, particularly Tom Brady joke, I would
Speaker 1: have thought that um, the court would have held that
Speaker 1: there were so few ways of expressing UM this particular
Speaker 1: joke that it shouldn't have been copyrighted in the first place.
Speaker 1: And there was also, uh, the Washington Monuments shrinkage joke,
Speaker 1: and that's actually based on a famous joke that was
Speaker 1: used in the Seinfeld show so many times it seems
Speaker 1: like both of them were taking it from that place.
Speaker 1: So um, now, how do you he wants, at least
Speaker 1: initially sued for a million dollars? How can a few
Speaker 1: jokes be worth that much? I think that's going to
Speaker 1: be a very hard number to prove up. Um, he
Speaker 1: will have to argue that when he writes these jokes
Speaker 1: and sells them to comedians, and that's his job, his profession.
Speaker 1: He has his jokes have been on Jay Leno's show
Speaker 1: apparently over a thousand times, that he makes money that way,
Speaker 1: that he charges a certain amount for each joke. And
Speaker 1: he'll have to show that these three jokes he would
Speaker 1: have charged but for the fact they were stolen by
Speaker 1: allegedly stolen by, that he would have charged million dollars.
Speaker 1: I think that's impossible to prove. I think what's more
Speaker 1: likely is that the plaintiff will rely upon UH Section
Speaker 1: file of four of the copyright law, which says, if
Speaker 1: you can't prove up the exact value of a copyright
Speaker 1: at work, you can claim what's done as statutory damages,
Speaker 1: and for those you can get up to a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand dollars per copyright at work. So here
Speaker 1: there were three jokes, three copyright at works. Um, it
Speaker 1: seems to me that the most he could collect is
Speaker 1: the UH four and fifty thou dollars. This seems to
Speaker 1: me like a trial where there should be a settlement
Speaker 1: before trial begins. But I don't know that Conan O'Brien
Speaker 1: would want to make any admission by settling. I think
Speaker 1: that's what that's the problem with the sort of lawsuit.
Speaker 1: The damage is really done when you file the lawsuit
Speaker 1: and accuse someone of stealing your jokes. UH. To this day,
Speaker 1: within the comedy business, that is a real black mark
Speaker 1: against you, even though many famous comedians of the years
Speaker 1: have been accused of doing it. It is a black mark,
Speaker 1: and you you almost force the defendant Conan in this instance,
Speaker 1: to go into court to defend themselves to clear their name,
Speaker 1: which makes a settlement very challenging. And Conan O'Brien said
Speaker 1: he was just devastated when he heard about this lawsuit.
Speaker 1: It's always interesting to talk to you, Terry. You have
Speaker 1: all the facts and all the behind the scenes information.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for being on Bloomberg Law. That's Terence
Speaker 1: ross a partner Captain Muchen Rosenman. That's it for this
Speaker 1: edition of Bloomberg Globe. We're back tomorrow one pm thanks
Speaker 1: to our technical director Reginald Bazil and our producer David Suckerman.
Speaker 1: And Carol Master is here. Carol, very quickly, what's your
Speaker 1: big topic today? All right, we're gonna continue following the
Speaker 1: president in the market reaction. We're going to start there June.
Speaker 1: You'll start there and and I'm sure you're going to
Speaker 1: start there almost every day for a few days to come.
Speaker 1: All Right, this is Bloomberg, Carol Master and Corey Johnson
Speaker 1: coming up next