So here is Edward Einhorn’s original copyright registration.
This copy is exhibit 51 that Einhorn’s own legal team submitted. You can see the entire thing here.
Einhorn claimed the “work” was created on October 21, 2004. The date for the filing of the copyright was December 10, 2004. This date is significant because the Einhorns didn’t use this registration to sue me for producing TAM LIN in 2004, the year that Einhorn was hired as a director. They used this copyright to sue me for producing TAM LIN in 2005, the year that Einhorn had absolutely nothing to do with the show. So he claimed that I used his “blocking and choreography” in 2005, in spite of the fact that the script was different, the direction was different and the set was different. In other words, no matter how different any production of TAM LIN was from what Einhorn did, he planned to claim it was in violation of his copyright registration.
But even more interesting is that Edward Einhorn registered a copyright on a derivative work based on my play TAM LIN and the form he submitted for registration does not even mention my name. He claims the title of the work is “BLOCKING AND CHOREOGRAPHY SCRIPT FOR TAM LIN.”
Now I’m not sure if the Einhorns falsely filed this work as a free-standing original work, or the Copyright Office did not require a declaration of a work as derivative in 2004.
In any case, Einhorn’s copyright registration currently in the Copyright Office’s database does mention my name. Here is a screen cap of the existing Einhorn registration:
So somewhere along the line Einhorn's registration was changed, which means the Copyright Office should know that the original registration was incomplete - if not outright fraudulent. And yet it doesn't seem to matter.
So Edward Einhorn filed a copyright registration without mentioning the living author of the original play, without the author’s knowledge in December 2004.
At eight o’clock in the morning, in October 2005 there was a knock at our apartment door...