Private or Public Domain?

Ever since it went on the air for ABC in 1945, Bride and Groom has enjoyed a high rating in daytime radio. Its surefire formula: a pleasant young couple tell how they met and fell in love, step nervously offstage for their wedding ceremony, then return to the microphone to be loaded with gifts and sent off on a honeymoon trip.

In 1949 its producers decided to switch the program to television, but Hollywood's KLAC-TV beat them to it with Wedding Bells, which did everything Bride and Groom did, and showed the actual wedding ceremony to boot.

Bride and Groom's producers called it piracy, brought suit. Last week, after a month-long trial, a Los Angeles superior court jury agreed, awarded them $800,000 damages. It was the biggest plagiarism award ever made in an industry which has no effective protection for mere ideas, and the first ever made for an alleged piracy from the one medium to the other. No one was more shocked by the verdict than KLAC's General Manager Don Fedderson, who sputtered: "Weddings are in the public domain! There have been wedding programs since the '30s; I used to put one on myself."

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