The Third Man: Resolution of Copyright Dispute

I was pleased a few weeks ago to be able finally to reach a settlement with Titan Books over John Walsh’s The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film. Published in September last year, it used large amounts of material from my book In Search of the Third Man without crediting me or seeking my permission.

Titan agreed to insert an errata slip into the first print run of the book to credit its use of my work, and to pay me a small fee. It also agreed that corrections would be made to any future reprint to give due credit to my work. The chief requirement of these corrections was to credit me as the source of the five interviews that were taken from my book and to add the following short paragraph to the beginning of the chapter called “The Shoot”:

This agreement was finally possible because of the common-sense and goodwill of the editorial director of Titan Books, with whom I was primarily in contact.

I wish I could write as positively about my experience of Studiocanal. The company is the copyright-holder for not only the film of The Third Man but also John Walsh’s book.

When I discovered that The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film had made extensive use of my work without my permission, I put the following questions to Studiocanal:

• What was its attitude to the evidence that The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film had not only used quotations from my work without proper credit but also heavily plagiarized me?

• Could Studiocanal assure me that  it would not  make use of its copyright in the book to initiate, or sanction, any further publication that infringed my copyright?

• Did Studiocanal still endorse The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film  as offering a company-approved version of the  history of The Third Man, as the title of the book suggested?

I received no reply to any of these questions. Apologising for the lack of answers, my contact there was personally sympathetic, but told me that Studiocanal would not offer any comment on the case. In that amoral way of some large corporations, Studiocanal seemed to me, in effect, to adopt a policy of sitting on the fence and – presumably wishing to minimise any possible liability of its own – to duck a principled engagement with the actual issues. I was left with the impression of a company that exploited intellectual property but showed very little respect for the people who actually created it.

The movie mogul responsible for the creation of The Third Man was Sir Alexander Korda. When British Lion was put into receivership in 1954, the receiver asked Alex who might best replace him as the company’s production adviser. “I don’t grow on trees,” he famously replied. I suppose the slide of British Lion into insignificance (although it still exists as an independent company) and the sale of its back catalogue are not surprising in the context of the British film industry’s general decline over the decades that followed. But what a pity that the present owners of a film as wonderful as The Third Man should show so little of the character and humanity of the people who made it.

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