We’ve written many times about the inherent conflict between free speech and copyright laws. Copyright law is an inherent restriction on free speech. The courts have tried to get around this with two tools: “fair use” as an exception to copyright and the “idea/expression” dichotomy, which is supposed to only allow copyright over the specific expression, rather than the idea (in practice, this is often violated — such as in the recent decision to ban an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye). So, that mostly leaves fair use. However, many people have noticed that fair use is woefully inadequate in preventing basic First Amendment abuses.
Justin Levine points us to an interesting paper by David Olson, where he proposes beefing up the basically non-existent “copyright misuse” defense for situations where copyright is clearly being used to stifle free speech against the First Amendment:
The Copyright Act serves First Amendment interests by encouraging authors to create works. But copyright law can also discourage the creation of new works by preventing subsequent creators from using copyrighted work to make their own, new speech. Courts have long recognized this inherent tension, and have also recognized that the conflict should sometimes be decided in favor of allowing a subsequent speaker the right to make unauthorized use of others’ copyrighted works. Accordingly, courts created, and Congress codified, the fair use defense to copyright infringement, which allows unauthorized use of copyrighted works under certain circumstances that encourage speech and creation of transformative works. The problem with fair use, however, is that the informational uncertainties and transaction costs of litigating the defense make the fair use right unavailable to many as a practical matter. Subsequent creators are left open to intimidation by copyright holders threatening infringement suits. By decoupling the copyright misuse defense from its basis in antitrust principles and basing it in First Amendment speech principles, the legal protections for fair use shift from theoretical rights to practical rights for many. Copyright misuse has two deterrent features that will allow fair use as a practical right. First, a copyright holder’s misuse of its copyrights against anyone can be used to prove the defense of misuse. Second, once misuse is found, the copyright owner loses its ability to enforce its copyright against everyone, at least until the misuse is cured. Thus, by defining as copyright misuse the unjustified chilling of speech that some copyright holders perpetrate, the misuse defense will encourage important speech rights that are currently under-protected.
This is definitely a paper worth reading, even if it seems unlikely to ever be adopted by the courts or Congress. It would definitely be a big improvement over what we have today. It’s really too bad how rare it is for courts to actually consider the First Amendment implications of their copyright rulings.
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