by Sarah A. Zimmerman
SEE Magazine
November 3, 2000

From childhood, we’re taught not to copy somebody else’s work and pass it off as our own. There are serious legal and moral issues at stake.

Nonetheless, it happens more frequently than we like to admit. Sarah Schulman, an award-winning novelist, activist and playwright from New York, knows too well what it’s like to have one’s ideas stolen. The similarities between her 1990 novel People in Trouble and the hit musical Rent are so striking that it doesn’t take long to see that key components of Rent’s plot were adapted directly from her novel. (Rent itself is based in part on Puccini’s opera, La Boheme; Schulman says her own work is based on modern bohemia.)

People in Trouble is set in the East Village and deals with issues of homosexuality, homelessness, AIDS and artists. Sound familiar? It should.

Both Rent and People in Trouble include a love triangle between a straight artist couple and the woman’s lesbian lover – the difference being that Schulman tells the story from the lesbian perspective and Rent writer Jonathan Larson focuses on the straight man’s point of view. In both, the woman caught in the middle is a performance artist who, through one of her pieces, trounces a greedy landlord who has been evicting AIDS patients. There is also the point in each where a lesbian and a gay man meet and form a relationship of sorts. Both also feature an interracial gay couple, where one of the men dies of AIDS.

The most damning evidence, however, lies in one detail: watch alarms. In 1987, when Schulman was writing People in Trouble, AZT, a drug used to treat AIDS, was commonly taken every four hours, so it was not unusual to hear watch alarms going off en masse in public places to remind patients to take the drug. By 1992, when Larson was writing Rent, AZT was taken every 12 hours, eliminating the need for watch alarms. Yet, this detail is found in the musical despite its setting in the 1990s. In her 1998 book Stage Struck: Theatre, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America, which outlines her struggle to prove copyright infringement, Schulman writes, "It was a detail Larson could only have gotten from one place – my novel. He wouldn’t have observed it in 1992, because it was no longer there to observe. And my book was the first place it was ever articulated as a cultural marker."

With so much evidence demonstrating that her ideas had indeed been used, Schulman tried to get some recognition for her work. Strangely, Penguin, who published her book, made no effort to pursue the

matter legally. She encountered serious roadblocks in getting legal representation. Even getting the story out in local media in New York proved to be a struggle. With his untimely death from a brain aneurysm (on the night of the final dress rehearsal before the musical’s début in 1996, no less), Larson was unable to defend himself or admit the error of his ways.

How could Jonathan Larson, the playwright behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical get away with using Schulman’s ideas? Copyright infringement law is not as clear as one would think. It doesn’t protect ideas from being used by someone else, merely the "expression" of one’s ideas. In Stage Struck, Schulman chronicles the response from Larson’s estate in regard to her allegations. Their response was this: "copyright does not extend to the ‘building blocks of creative expression’ which typically include, among other things, the work’s theme, plot and stock characters and settings." Setting the bar that low leaves the door wide open for anyone to use another person’s ideas so long as it is not expressed in the same way.

Schulman doesn’t claim Rent tells the same story as People in Trouble. In fact, she would say Rent used her ideas to "express something opposite" to what she expressed. Nonetheless, the similarities are so glaring that she deserves credit given where credit is due. She ultimately decided not to pursue the matter legally and will likely never get the acknowledgment she truly deserves.