Tom Stone wrote:Bill Mullins wrote:But here's the rub. The license agreement is between Half Half Man and the original buyer of the book. If I buy a second hand copy, how can their agreement about performance rights possibly apply to me?
The agreement about performance rights do not apply to a second hand buyer, so you would not have those rights. Seems quite straightforward.
I should have been more clear. I cannot violate an agreement that I am not a party to.
Suppose you buy the book, read it, perform for a year, get tired of it, and sell the book to me for $100 cash. I read it, like the routine, and start to perform it. There is nothing that Helder can do about it, and the agreement that he made you agree to before he would sell it to you doesn't protect him from my actions in any way. Who would he sue? On what grounds? I live in Alabama, and have never agreed to accept the jurisdiction of the "province of California" (which, by the way, seems to have been corrected to the "state of California").
If he has any recourse under copyright law (and he probably doesn't), then the license agreement didn't protect him at all.
This is an example of why magicians are in a weird place with respect to performance rights. We historically have agreed to the custom that ownership of a legal copy of a published routine grants one the right to perform the routine. That custom has no grounding in law (ownership of a copy of the script to "Waiting for Godot" doesn't grant one the right to perform it, as you point out above). So either thousands of magicians routinely violate copyright laws by performing routines we haven't formally licensed, and we as a group accept and endorse the practice, or copyright law doesn't apply to magic performances, and legally we don't need each other's permissions.