cease and desist letters never have any legal standing; they are really just a way to short-circuit litigation (sometimes for good and sometimes for bad reasons), at best, they are an alert that there is an issue that one ought not to proceed without resolving. And yes, logically, the licensing house is the first call one should make, to ask what gives. Remember also that the way these standard agreements are written they are basically revocable and designed to make sure the licensing house can't be left with liability.
Yes Rudin's reputation precedes him, but my guess is that he did the right thing by cutting this off at the pass while others may have been dragging their feet. The worst case scenario is for a production to be cancelled after lots of money has been spent on it. (And letting extant productions run there course is not how things are done.) One more thing: especially where as here we are talking about totally different plays, letting the "wrong" one go forward is not simply a matter of having some community theatre production running of the same script. Make that two more things: Ruin's focus is not just Broadway, but the tour in the US and the UK (at least), and the rights to the play in which, under the circumstances, he may well have an outsized interest. |
