Scott Hervey

Journalist Bob Woodward interviewed President Trump on numerous occasions during his 2019 and 2020 presidency. Trump granted consent to be recorded for Woodward’s upcoming book. Woodward later released segments of these recordings, along with one recording made with Trump during his presidential campaign in 2016, as part of an audiobook, The Trump Tapes. Trump claims that Woodward did not have his permission to release these audiotapes as a separate audiobook and sued Woodard and his publisher for, among other claims, copyright infringement.

The 1950 case Desny v. Wilder set the ground rules for an idea theft/implied contract case in California. In Desny, the plaintiff Victor Desny wrote a script depicting the real-life story of Floyd Collins, a boy who made headlines after he was trapped in a cave 80 feet underground. In an effort to market his script, Desny called Billy Wilder, a writer, producer and director at Paramount Pictures. Desny could not get through to Wilder and subsequently stripped his script to the bare facts so that Wilder’s secretary could copy it in shorthand over the phone. After reading his synopsis, Desny told Wilder’s secretary that Wilder and Paramount could use the script only if they paid him a reasonable amount for doing so. Shortly thereafter, Wilder created his own movie script mirroring Desny’s. Because Desny’s script was based on historical facts, and because Desny only conveyed the bare minimum of those facts to Wilder’s secretary, both parties conceded for the purpose of the appeal that the synopsis was not sufficiently original to form the basis of a federal copyright claim. The court, however, held that Desny stated sufficient facts to establish the existence of an implied-in-fact contract between the parties.