Lolita's Copyright

It seems to me that this mixes three areas of law, only one of which is copyright:

• Unfair trade practices/deception ("passing off" as part of the "same" story)
• Potential trademark infringement (not for Lolita, but certainly for Bob Cumbow's well-taken Star Wars(tm) example)
• Appropriating the "essence," as in Nation/Harper & Row.

This last point is the only one that's really copyright law, and I think that's where it gets, to use the technical term, wishy-washy. Whether the new work grabs the essence of the old one (what exactly is the essence of a literary work, anyway?) seems to me a judgment call. In the case of LOLITA, the public at large probably thinks that the essence is the dirty-old-man-screws-his-prepubescent- stepdaughter image that pervaded the censorship battles over the book when it was first released. I'm not sure it's that simple, though.

C.E. Petit
<cepetit[_at_]usa.net> Received on Thu Jul 08 1999 - 04:53:28 GMT