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Dark Passage
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dark Passage is a novel by David Goodis which was the basis for the 1947 film noir Dark Passage.
Convicted murder Vincent Parry escapes from prison and is picked up and sheltered by Irene Jansen, an artist with an interest in his case. Helped by a friendly cabbie, Parry gets a new face from a plastic surgeon, thereby enabling him to dodge the authorities and find his wife's real murderer. He has difficulty staying hidden at Irene's. This is because Madge Rapf, the spiteful woman whose testimony sent him up to prison keeps stopping by.
The copyright status of Dark Passage was the subject of a dispute between Goodis' estate and United Artists Television. The Goodis estate claimed that United Artists' series The Fugitive infringed their copyright in the book. United Artists claimed that the work had fallen into the public domain under the terms of the Copyright Act of 1909 because it had been originally published as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post and Goodis never obtained a separate copyright on the work as a whole in his own name. In Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit limited the so-called "Doctrine of Indivisibility," explaining that it was a judicial doctrine related only to standing, and should not operate to completely deprive a claimant of his copyright.
