White

Appellant sought a declaratory judgment that a manuscript entitled “Gaelic,” authored by Stewart Edward White, and a certain book by the same author entitled “The Job of Living,” based on the Gaelic manuscript and quoting from it, are in the public domain and may be quoted without infringement of the copyright claimed by appellee Kimmell or the common-law proprietary rights claimed by her in Gaelic. For convenience appellant will be referred to as the plaintiff, appellee Kimmell as the defendant, and Stewart Edward White as White.

Some preliminary attention should be given the nature of the Gaelic manuscript. Gaelic is supposedly the spirit of an individual who had departed this world and become an invisible non-material entity. The work embodies communications from Gaelic, received chiefly by White’s wife. The communications were written down by various individuals, and were subsequently, between about 1920 and 1930, reduced to manuscript form by White. The latter identified Gaelic as his and his wife’s “nickname for what seemed to us a single and definite personality, apparently detailed to tell us what made the wheels go round.”

Plaintiff’s complaint avers that the Gaelic…