Republican Study Committee Policy Brief on Copyright: Part 1

November 21, 2012 · · 15 comments

Late last Friday evening, a policy brief written by 24 year old Derek Khanna was posted to the website for the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus of conservative House Republicans. The brief, Three Myths About Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix It, was removed from the site Saturday morning, but copies were all over the internet shortly afterward, with critics of copyright applauding the paper.

Many on the internet were quick to declare the paper the absolute most stunningly brilliant paper history has ever produced. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick lamented the fact that, having read the paper, he will no longer be able to enjoy future papers, for they will only pale in comparison.

RSC spokesman Brian Staessle remarked upon retracting the brief that ”we hope people will now use this opportunity to engage in polite and serious discussion of copyright law.” I agree. Copyright law increasingly requires dialogue from all corners of society; this is, in fact, one of the reasons I began writing this blog over two years ago.

But any debate or dialogue should begin with sound premises. This policy brief doesn’t. Instead, like an unfortunate strand of copyright skepticism, it runs from reality, rewrites history, and hides from logic.

The brief begins with Khanna presenting three “myths” that he debunks, and then turns to several areas of concern under current copyright law while finally offering a number of potential policy solutions. Today I want to begin an in-depth look at the brief, starting with the first two “myths”. In later posts, I will look at the remaining sections.

Myth 1. The purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content

Khanna begins:

It’s a common misperception that the Constitution enables our current legal regime of copyright protection – in fact, it does not. The Constitution’s clause on Copyright and patents states:

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8)

Thus, according to the Constitution, the overriding purpose of the copyright system is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” In today’s terminology we may say that the purpose is to lead to maximum productivity and innovation

Khanna is correct on one point: the view of the Copyright Clause he disagrees with is indeed common. But rather than being a misperception, this is the view embraced by the Founding Fathers and, over the past 200 years, the Supreme Court, Congress, and numerous jurists, scholars, and writers.1

In recent decades, many copyright skeptics have increasingly turned to the Founding period of US history in search of arguments against the perceived overreach of the law. This search has given birth to many myths about the goals and purposes of Congress’s copyright power.

Though there was little said about the copyright power during this time, what was said more often than not supports a property right to establish a functioning market for the creation and dissemination of expressive works, not the utilitarian view embraced by Khanna here.

This is evident several years before the Constitution would be drafted. James Madison, who would author the Copyright Clause sat on the committee of the Continental Congress which recommended that the states pass laws protecting copyright. In March 1783, this committee issued a report saying it was “persuaded that nothing is more properly a man’s own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius.”2

Most of the States that subsequently adopted copyright statutes explicitly adopted the Continental Congress’s natural rights language.3

If compensating creators is not the purpose of copyright law, then early lawmakers must not have gotten the memo either. As the first Congress worked on a copyright act, South Carolina Representative Aedenus Burke urged his fellow Representatives of the importance to creators of passing a copyright bill, noting “several gentlemen had lately published the fruits of their industry and application, and were every hour in danger of having them surreptitiously printed.”4

Most telling, the Supreme Court has spoken on the Constitutional purpose of copyright twice in the past decade. Claims similar to Khanna’s were thoroughly rejected by the Court in 2003:

JUSTICE STEVENS’ characterization of reward to the author as “a secondary consideration” of copyright law understates the relationship between such rewards and the “Progress of Science.” As we have explained, “[t]he economic philosophy behind the [Copyright] [C]lause … is the conviction that encouragement of individual effort by personal gain is the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors and inventors.” Accordingly, “copyright law celebrates the profit motive, recognizing that the incentive to profit from the exploitation of copyrights will redound to the public benefit by resulting in the proliferation of knowledge…. The profit motive is the engine that ensures the progress of science.” Rewarding authors for their creative labor and “promot[ing] … Progress” are thus complementary; as James Madison observed, in copyright “[t]he public good fully coincides . . . with the claims of individuals.” JUSTICE BREYER’s assertion that “copyright statutes must serve public, not private, ends,” similarly misses the mark. The two ends are not mutually exclusive; copyright law serves public ends by providing individuals with an incentive to pursue private ones.5

And again in 2012:

Even were we writing on a clean slate, petitioners’ argument would be unavailing. Nothing in the text of the Copyright Clause confines the “Progress of Science” exclusively to “incentives for creation.” Evidence from the founding, moreover, suggests that inducing dissemination—as opposed to creation—was viewed as an appropriate means to promote science. Until 1976, in fact, Congress made “federal copyright contingent on publication[,] [thereby] providing incentives not primarily for creation,” but for dissemination. Our decisions correspondingly recognize that “copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.6

Khanna next attempts to cast proponents of copyright as somehow taking an “entitlement” mentality toward their rights. He concludes this first section by saying:

Strictly speaking, because of the constitutional basis of copyright and patent, legislative discussions on copyright/patent reform should be based upon what promotes the maximum “progress of sciences and useful arts” instead of “deserving” financial compensation.

I doubt many — if any — creators believe they are “entitled” to financial compensation merely because they have created something. Like any market, creators are only entitled to seek profit, not have it given to them. As Irwin Karp testified during the last Copyright Act revision, though the Copyright Clause establishes these rights, “it does not guarantee a fair reward, or any reward.”

For authors and publishers, both commercial and non-profit, must depend on income derived from uses of their books and journals to compensate for the talent, labor and money expended in creating them, and provide working capital for further publications. And as entrepreneurs, they must assume the ever-present risk that books and journals produced by substantial labor and cash outlays will fail financially although they make valuable intellectual contributions to the public interest.

But there’s a huge difference between feeling entitled to a reward and arguing for compensation when economic users exploit one of the exclusive rights of a work — by reproducing or publicly performing a work, for example. One of the favorite claims of copyright skeptics is that creators routinely oppose new technology because it “disrupts their business model.”7 On the contrary, it is often the case that the businesses utilizing the new technology are the ones who feel entitled — entitled to profit off the exploitation of established rights without compensating creators merely because they are using new technology. In this case, creators do “deserve” compensation. This isn’t a prize at the bottom of the box, it’s one of the foundations of a just capitalist society.

Myth 2. Copyright is free market capitalism at work

Khanna next writes:

Copyright violates nearly every tenet of laissez faire capitalism. Under the current system of copyright, producers of content are entitled to a guaranteed, government instituted, government subsidized content-monopoly

These two sentences are packed with so many misconceptions that I want to address them each one by one.

First, copyright has historically been treated like property — not a government subsidy.

Thomas Paine said in 1782, “in all countries where literature is protected, and it never can flourish where it is not, the works of an author are his legal property.”

At the birth of the United States, copyright was couched in terms of property more often that not. In Copyright and Incomplete Historiographies: Of Piracy, Propertization, and Thomas Jefferson, Justin Hughes traces the ”robust history of copyright being referred to as ‘property.’”8 Most frequently, those involved in the creation and maintenance of copyright law have cited to the work of John Locke and his labor theory of property to justify copyright — a view that remains viable to this day.

Eaton Drone’s 1879 treatise on copyright, considered “the most extensive and comprehensive published on the topic in the United States in the nineteenth century” and the dominant treatise for decades, also embraced the view of copyright as property in Lockean terms. More importantly, it noted, in stark terms, that “To preserve the sanctity of property has ever been a chief function of government. Next to protecting the lives and liberties of the people, it is the highest.”

Not only is the security of property a chief function of government, but its protection is inextricably linked to the advancement of life and liberty. Even today, this important role of property in free capitalist societies continues to be expressed:

States which did not guarantee property and contract did not flourish economically compared to states that did. . . Property and contract law have indeed been foundational to enabling capitalism to take off. . . The emergence of well defined, secure property rights was a part of a much broader historical process in which absolute monarchies and their legitimating political philosophies lost their institutional dominance to be replaced by the institution of the modern state and secular political philosophies that recognized the rights of individuals within and against the state. . . The idea of a natural right of property was one crucial premise in John Locke’s rejection of the absolute authority of Kings.9

Like property in general, copyright — the recognition of the rights of creators — has contributed to free society. Former Register of Copyrights Barbara Ringer wrote in 1974, “It is striking that the second and third copyright statutes in the world — those of the United States of America and of France — were adopted immediately following the revolutions in those countries that overthrew autocratic government and were based on ideals of personal liberty and individual freedom.” She adds:

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are meaningless unless authors are able to create independently from control by anyone, and to find a way to put their works before the public. Economic advantage and the shibboleth of “convenience” distort the copyright law into a weapon against authors. Anyone who cares about freedom and authorship must insure that, in the process of improving the efficiency of our law, we do not throw it all the way back to its repressive origins in the Middle Ages.

Far from the government instituted regulation that Khanna suggests in his policy brief, copyright is no more and no less like any other free market system.10

In fact, the Constitutional Convention delegates explicitly rejected proposals that would give the federal government a more active role in promoting the progress of the sciences and useful arts — for example, the establishment of a national university or provisions for premiums and rewards to inventors and authors.11 The delegates tossed these aside for the hands-off approach embodied in the Copyright Clause, which would establish a functioning market for expression. This suggests that the delegates thought the pursuit of self-interest would best serve to promote the public interest — as James Madison said of the Clause in the Federalist Papers, “The public good fully coincides. . . with the claims of individuals.”

Some might argue that the promotion of the public interest through the pursuit of self-interest is one of the cornerstones of capitalism.12

Much along the same lines, Khanna’s characterization of copyright as “government-subsidized” is completely erroneous. The government offers nothing to creators except a functioning market to pursue their own ends. Khanna’s suggestion that because copyright holders can pursue civil and criminal remedies for infringement acts as a subsidy is bizarre. That would make all property a government subsidy — contracts too, since contractual parties can turn to courts in the event of a breach. Khanna asserts that because the statutory damages are “massive”, this creates a subsidy. While I think it’s completely appropriate to debate whether copyright remedies are fair and effective, for purposes of this myth, it’s enough to point out that the nature of the remedies does not transform a copyright into a government subsidy.

Second, Khanna describes copyright as a “content-monopoly.”

There is perhaps no more elementary and persistent error in the history of copyright then the claim that it is a monopoly.13 And, just as persistently, it has been debunked.

As in the entry for “monopolies” in an 1839 encyclopedia, which states, “Copyright and patents are now generally placed among monopolies by legal writers, but not correctly.”14 A treatise on literary property written around the same time says:

[The author's] case is precisely the same as that of the maker of houses, who cannot get a monopoly rent, because other men make more houses, as soon as he demands too much. So, when an author who has produced a book for which the demand is great, is unwise enough to ask too high a price, another author, (perhaps greater than he,) will write another book on the same subject, and thus demolish his ideal monopoly.15

An 1896 book on copyright goes into more detail, noting that such “monopoly language” is based more on rhetoric than reality:

It is sometimes attempted to stigmatize copyright as monopoly, and writers of loose and careless habit sometimes speak of copyright as monopoly. It is no more monopoly than is the ordinary ownership of a horse or a piece of land. Blackstone says that a monopoly is—

A license or privilege . . . whereby the subject in general is restrained from that liberty of manufacturing or trading which he had before.

The law dictionaries define it in the same way. A monopoly takes away from the public the enjoyment of something which the public before possessed. Neither copyright nor patent does this, for neither can be applied to anything which is not new; neither can be applied to anything which the public before possessed. The author and inventor must produce something new in order to be entitled to copyright or patent.16

There are many other examples from more recent decades.17

Finally, as the Supreme Court said in one of its more recent copyright cases, “copyright gives the holder no monopoly on any knowledge. A reader of an author’s writing may make full use of any fact or idea she acquires from her reading.”18

Final Notes

Next time, I’ll dive into the remaining pages of Derek Khanna’s policy brief, but, in my opinion it has so far not gotten off to a great start.

Parker Higgins of the EFF said of the paper that Congress shouldn’t debate copyright in a reality-free zone. I agree. But we should concentrate on actual reality, not the alternative reality that Khanna and some other copyright skeptics have constructed over the past few years. No doubt there are areas of copyright law that need improving. And certainly there’s no argument that some who favor the continuing vitality of creators’ rights at times use unhelpful rhetoric. But Khanna’s brief is Exhibit A in what not to do. A fair, just, and equitable marketplace for creative expression deserves better.

Read Republican Study Committee Policy Brief on Copyright: Part 2

Footnotes

  1. See my post Copyright is for the Author First and the Nation Second. [↩]
  2. 24 Journals of the Continental Congress 326. [↩]
  3. The preambles to the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island copyright acts stated:

    Whereas the improvement of knowledge, the progress of civilization, the publick weal of the Commonwealth, and the advancement of human happiness, greatly depend on the efforts of learned and ingenious persons in the various arts and sciences: As the principal encouragement such persons can have to make great and beneficial exertions of this nature, must exist in the legal security of the fruits of their study and industry to themselves, and as such security is one of the natural rights of all men, there being no property more peculiarly man’s own than that which is produced by the labour of his mind.

    In a similar fashion, North Carolina’s copyright act read:

    Whereas nothing is more strictly a man’s own than the fruit of his study, and it is proper that men should be encouraged to pursue useful knowledge by the hope of reward; and as the security of literary property must greatly tend to encourage genius, to promote useful discoveries and to the general extension of art and commerce. [↩]

  4. Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., 2nd sess., 1080. [↩]
  5. Eldred v Ashcroft, 537 US 186, n.18. [↩]
  6. Golan v Holder, 565 US ___ (2012). [↩]
  7. See, for example, previous posts on The Story of John and Jack and 100 Years of Copyright and Disruptive Technology. [↩]
  8. 79 Southern California Law Review 993, 1004 (2006). [↩]
  9. Dr. Peter Drahos, The Universality of Intellectual Property Rights: Origins and Developments. [↩]
  10. See also Testimony of Irwin Karp: “the instrument chosen by the Constitution to serve the public interest, i.e., the securing of literary and scientific works of lasting value — is an independent, entrepreneurial property-rights system of writing and publishing”; David Householder, The Progress of Knowledge: A Reexamination of the Fundamental Principles of American Copyright Law, 14 Loy. L.A. Ent. L. Rev. 1, 35 (1993): the Copyright Clause “assumes that promoting the progress of knowledge is advantageous and directs Congress to achieve this benefit by securing exclusive rights in intellectual property. It mandates the creation of a marketplace, wherein this unique form of property, the copyright, may be traded and protected.” [↩]
  11. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. 2, August 18, 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911). [↩]
  12. Some might also argue that “to oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism.” [↩]
  13. This phrase comes from Edmund W. Kitch, Elementary and Persistent Errors in the Economic Analysis of Intellectual Property, 53 Vand. L. Rev. 1727 (2000). [↩]
  14. The Penny Cyclopedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Vol. 15, pg 341 (C. Knight, London, 1839). [↩]
  15. Philip H. Nicklin, Remarks on Literary Property (Phila. 1838). [↩]
  16. The Question of Copyright, pg. 86 (GP Putnam, 1896). [↩]
  17. See, for example, RR Bowker, Copyright, Its History and Its Law, pg 50 (Houghton Mifflin 1912), ”Copyright is a monopoly only in the sense that any ownership is a monopoly”; Karp, Id.,

    The copyright in a book is not a “monopoly” in the antitrust sense. It does not give the author control over the market in books, or the business of publishing them. His book must compete in the market place with the 40,000 other titles published that year and the hundreds of thousands still in print from prior years, including many that deal with the same subject. His copyright only gives him certain rights to use the book he created. The owner of a copyright only has a “monopoly” in the innocuous sense that all property owners do — each owns a collection of rights, granted by law, to use that which he has created, purchased or inherited.

    Householder, Id.,

    It is like saying the owner of the lot on the northwest comer of Elm and First Streets controls, and is able to exclude competitors from the market for, property on the northwest comer of Elm and First Streets. That owner’s right is a property right; calling it a monopoly adds nothing to an understanding of the owner’s rights. Such usage merely serves to make the meaning of the term ”monopoly” less precise and therefore less useful. [↩]

  18. Eldred v Ashcroft, 537 US 186, 217 (2003). [↩]
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Friday’s Endnotes – 01/06/12

January 06, 2012 · · 30 comments

Happy 2012 everybody!

Joshua Johnson’s KQED Forum on Rogue Sites — KQED recently hosted a discussion of rogue sites legislation featuring EFF-attorney-turned-Google-lawyer Fred von Lohmann, indie filmmaker Ellen Seidler, Rep. Darrell Issa, and NBC Universal general counsel Rick Cotton. Chris Castle takes a good look at some points that didn’t come up or weren’t fully addressed.

Does the DMCA Work? — Interesting analysis from Dr. Christopher S. Harrison on the recent decision in UMG v. Veoh and Megaupload’s recent lawsuit against Universal. “These two cases exemplify the Bizarro World the DMCA has become, in which the business models of service providers require copyright infringement on a massive scale … but labels get sued over takedown notices.”

The Original and Traditional Meaning of “Freedom … of the Press” — Eugene Volokh announces his recent article arguing that “freedom of the press” as it was understood by the Constitutional Framers refers to the press-as-technology rather than, as some have argued, press-as-industry. A good read for those who have been following my own series on copyright and the freedom of the press.

Finding a Job in Film (for Prop Makers) — My brother Eric, recently transplanted to North Carolina from NYC, where he served as assistant props master at the Public Theater, provides some useful advice for theater professionals looking to transition into the film world.

Reddit has gone mad with power — After calling for a boycott on GoDaddy for its support of SOPA, (the number of GoDaddy subscribers actually increased during that time, according to the article) users of the web site turned their attention to defeating political supporters of the bill in the upcoming election. They eventually chose Rep. Paul Ryan (who hasn’t stated a position on the bill). As Gawker notes, “The thinking of the internet hive mind is shallow and frantic, scrambling from one outrage to the next.”

France Animation v Robinson – a case comment — Barry Sookman examines a recent decision from the Quebec Court of Appeals that he calls a “gold mine for copyright lawyers.” Among the many interesting portions is the Court’s discussion that punitive damages are available under Quebec law because copyright infringement violates fundamental rights and freedoms.

Removing the legal eye patch — The Boston Globe came out in support of SOPA this week. “While opponents of the bill cry censorship, their fears seem to based on the belief that it somehow creates a slippery slope – that blocking an illegal download of an Adele album will be logically followed by blocking a search for information about the Arab Spring. The government already has cracked down on online child pornography without a corresponding attack on civil liberties. There’s no reason that the First Amendment would be endangered if the Justice Department beefed up its enforcement of copyright law as well.”

In a Big Year for New Soul, a Small But Influential Label Turns 10 — I’ve long been a fan of Daptone Records, the pioneers of the retro-soul sound that was most famously featured on Amy Winehouse’s Back in Black. The Atlantic takes a look at the label as it celebrates its first decade.

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Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Part 4

January 02, 2012 · · 66 comments

Does copyright conflict with free speech? The idea that it does has gained a lot of traction recently. Yet arguments of a conflict between copyright law and the First Amendment in the United States are relatively new — understanding why the two co-existed for nearly two centuries before these arguments began to appear should prove valuable to current scholarship.

In previous posts, I outlined several explanations for this lack of conflict based on historical documents and court decisions. Copyright laws were passed by the States after provisions for freedom of speech and the press were enshrined in law, indicating that the two were viewed as compatible. At that time, Liberty of the press was defined primarily as an absence of government licensing — even under broader definitions, protecting an author’s copyright was not viewed as offensive to a free press. In part, this was because copyright was conceived as a property right, and liberty does not extend to invasions of other’s rights.

Today I want to present perhaps one of the most important reasons copyright has historically escaped free speech scrutiny.

During their formative years, the liberty of the press and recognition of copyright were seen as means to an end. They shared the same goal — the advancement of knowledge, the arts, and sciences. And they were viewed as complementary, rather than conflicting, means to reach this goal.

Freedom of the Press Goals and Purpose

During the 18th century, at a minimum, the freedom of the press meant an absence of prior restraints on publishing — whether through government licensing or censorship. Noted jurist William Blackstone, who ensconced this minimalist definition of press liberty in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, described the aversion to previous restraints: “To subject the press to the restrictive power of a licenser, as was formerly done, both before and since the revolution, is to subject all freedom of sentiment to the prejudices of one man, and make him the arbitrary and infallible judge of all controverted points in learning, religion, and government.”

The Founding Fathers viewed the liberty of the press as promoting broader goals then this. In a 1774 Letter to the Inhabitants of the Province of Quebec, the First Continental Congress wrote:

The last right we shall mention, regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists, besides the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general, in its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of Government, its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated, into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs.

To the Continental Congress, the primary purpose of press liberty was political: a democratic government needs to be openly examined to function. But note the secondary purpose: “the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general.” This is strikingly similar to the later constitutional purpose given for Congress’s copyright authority: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

A Free Press Promotes Knowledge

There are other examples from the 18th and 19th centuries of those who believed one of the purposes of free speech was to encourage knowledge.

The Cato Letters, a series of newspaper articles published in England in the 1720s that served as ideological inspiration for the Founding Fathers, included this oft-quoted passage on the freedom of speech: “Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together: And it is the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them. It produces excellent writers, and encourages men of fine genius.”

In his preface to the 1738 edition of Milton’s Areopagitica, poet James Thomson1 writes about the importance of this goal of a free press to society:

What is it that distinguishes human Society from a brutish herd, but the flourishing of the Arts and Sciences; the free Exercise of Wit and Reason? What can Government mean, intend, or produce, that is worthy of Man, or beneficial to him, as he is a rational creature, besides Wisdom, Knowlege, Virtue and Science? Is it merely indeed that we may eat, drink, sleep, sing and dance with security that we choose Governours, subject our selves to their administration, and pay taxes? Take away the Arts, Religion, Knowlege, Virtue, (all of which must flourish, or sink together) and in the Name of Goodness, what is left to us that is worth enjoying or protecting? Yet take away the Liberty of the Press, and we are all at once stript of the use of our noblest Faculties: our Souls themselves are imprisoned in a dark dungeon: we may breathe, but we cannot be said to live.

Liberty of the press, as Milton argued for in what is considered one of the “most influential and impassioned philosophical defences” of the principle — here, taking the form of an absence of government licensing or censorship — is a prerequisite to the progress of knowledge, art, and science. Thomson was not alone in this sentiment.

Elsewhere, a London magazine from 1820 described the goal of the liberty of the press like this: “To promote the diffusion of knowledge, to elicit the fruits of genius, to facilitate and to encourage the general interchange of minds and of hearts”

And the first issue of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, published in 1834, included a brief article on newspapers, where it was writeen, “The progress of society has been onward, wherever there has been a free press maintained and encouraged. It has chased away much darkness from the civilized parts of the world, and spread light and knowledge in our path.”

Copyright Promotes Knowledge

The copyright statutes passed in the States prior to the drafting of the Constitution use similar language. The acts were passed with the purpose of “the encouragement of literature and genius” and the goal of, for example, “the improvement of knowledge, the progress of civilisation, and the advancement of human happiness.” The means of implementing this purpose to reach the goal was the securing of legal rights to “men of learning who devote their time and talents” to literature and genius.2

The impetus for these laws came in part from the efforts of authors like Joel Barlow. In 1783, he wrote the Continental Congress in favor of a copyright law. The famous poet and drafter of the Treaty of Tripoli told the Congress, “As we have few Gentlemen of fortune sufficient to enable them to spend a whole life in study, or enduce others to do it by their patronage, it is more necessary, in this country than in any other, that the rights of authors should be secured by law.”

Barlow’s letter encapsulated the reasoning behind the idea of copyright as an incentive to promote knowledge: literary and intellectual works took a considerable amount of time and resources to produce, and given the great public benefits that flow from them, some way of encouraging people to devote their time and resources to producing them was needed.

You can see this idea adopted and explained by others throughout the 19th century. In his famous speech to the English House of Commons in 1841, Thomas Babington Macaulay said:

The advantages arising from a system of copyright are obvious. It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books; we cannot have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated; and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright. You cannot depend for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works which require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives. Of these persons few will be found among the rich and the noble. The rich and the noble are not impelled to intellectual exertion by necessity. They may be impelled to intellectual exertion by the desire of distinguishing themselves, or by the desire of benefiting the community. But it is generally within these walls that they seek to signalise themselves and to serve their fellow-creatures. Both their ambition and their public spirit, in a country like this, naturally take a political turn. It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books. Such men must be remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright.

In 1853, Charles Bishop Goodrich published The Science of Government: As Exhibited in the Institutions of the United States, a popular early treatise on US government. His section on copyright takes the same view as Barlow and Macaulay:

Another power conferred upon congress was and is designed “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” … The propriety of the power, and of its enlarged and liberal exercise, cannot be doubted. Individuals cannot devote their time and lives to the attainment of extensive or important knowledge, unless they can derive some personal benefit from their labor. In every useful invention, in the production of useful writings, the public have as much, and frequently a greater interest than the individual inventor or writer can have. Every measure which can with propriety be adopted to enlarge and extend the progress of science and of the arts, is calculated to accomplish the elevation of the people, and must therefore be regarded as of the utmost importance. The effect of our system, and the encouragement which it affords to the promotion of knowledge, has been apparent. Much advancement has been made, in fact it may be regarded as characteristic, and may be said of the American people, that they are progressive, inventive, and suggestive, in all their operations.

Patronage

At this point, one might think that the shared goals of a free press and copyright are only coincidental: one could easily find references to other means of promoting knowledge at the time. For example, in his first State of the Union address, President George Washington told Congress, “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature,” but left it to them to decide “Whether this desirable object will be best promoted by affording aids to seminaries of learning already established, by the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients.”

Yet as the ideas of a free press and copyright developed, the relationship between the two strenghthened. There was something specific about securing legal rights to authors so that they may profit off their writings that not only advanced the arts and sciences but also advanced the principles of a free press.

As noted above, Macaulay spoke about two ways to remunerate authors: patronage and copyright. He follows that with an explanation of why the latter is more preferable to a free society:

There have been times in which men of letters looked, not to the public, but to the government, or to a few great men, for the reward of their exertions. It was thus in the time of Maecenas and Pollio at Rome, of the Medici at Florence, of Louis the Fourteenth in France, of Lord Halifax and Lord Oxford in this country. Now, Sir, I well know that there are cases in which it is fit and graceful, nay, in which it is a sacred duty to reward the merits or to relieve the distresses of men of genius by the exercise of this species of liberality. But these cases are exceptions. I can conceive no system more fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which they should be taught to look for their daily bread to the favour of ministers and nobles. I can conceive no system more certain to turn those minds which are formed by nature to be the blessings and ornaments of our species into public scandals and pests.

Like Macaulay, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story tied the freedom of the press and copyright together. In an 1826 discourse, Story wrote:

One of the most striking characteristics of our age, and that, indeed, which has worked deepest in all the changes of its fortunes and pursuits, is the general diffusion of knowledge. This is emphatically the age of reading. In other times this was the privilege of the few; in ours, it is the possession of the many. Learning once constituted the accomplishment of those in the higher orders of society, who had no relish for active employment, and of those, whose monastic lives and religious profession sought to escape from the weariness of their common duties. Its progress may be said to have been gradually downwards from the higher to the’middle classes of society. It scarcely reached at all, in its joys or its sorrows, in its instructions or its fantasies, the home of the peasant and artisan. It now radiates in all directions; and exerts its central force more in the middle than in any other class of society. The means of education were formerly within the reach of few. It required wealth to accumulate knowledge. The possession of a library was no ordinary achievement. The learned leisure of a fellowship in some university seemed almost indispensable for any successful studies; and the patronage of princes and courtiers was the narrow avenue to public favor. I speak of a period at little more than the distance of two centuries; not of particular instances, but of the general cast and complexion of life.

The principal cause of this change is to be found in the freedom of the press, or rather in this, cooperating with the cheapness of the press. … The daily press first instructed men in their wants, and soon found, that the eagerness of curiosity outstripped the power of gratifying it. No man can now doubt the fact, that wherever the press is free, it will emancipate the people; wherever knowledge circulates unrestrained, it is no longer safe to oppress; wherever public opinion is enlightened, it nourishes an independent, masculine, and healthful spirit. If Faustus were now living, he might exclaim with all the enthusiasm of Archimedes, and with a far nearer approach to the truth, Give me, where I may place a free press, and I will shake the world.

One interesting effect, which owes its origin to this universal love and power of reading, is felt in the altered condition of authors themselves. They no longer depend upon the smiles of a favored few. The patronage of the great is no longer submissively entreated, or exultingly proclaimed. Their patrons are the public; their readers are the civilized world. They address themselves, not to the present generation alone, but aspire to instruct posterity. No blushing dedications seek an easy passport to fame, or flatter the perilous condescension of pride. No illuminated letters flourish on the silky page, asking admission to the courtly drawingroom. Authors are no longer the humble companions or dependents of the nobility: but they constitute the chosen ornaments of society, and are welcomed to the gay circles of fashion and the palaces of princes. Theirs is no longer an unthrifty vocation, closely allied to penury; but an elevated profession, maintaining its thousands in lucrative pursuits.

Copyright: a Critical Component of a Free Press

It would seem that Story and Macaulay’s view of copyright as an integral component of a free press held sway throughout the 18th century and into the 19th.

An editorial calling for copyright protection of newspaper articles appeared in The Reasoner in 1844, in which the authors argued, “If the public desire a really free press, they must not look to it as a source of taxation; and if they are anxious for truth, for elevated and elevating sentiments, for ideas matured by study and reflection, and an honest exposition of grievances, they must recognise original articles as property, and secure them against a plundering appropriation by a copyright.”

British lawyer James Paterson, in an 1880 commentary on the liberty of the press, speech, and public worship, said that ”When any person is free to publish whatever he deems interesting or valuable either as a mode of procuring profit to himself or as a means of influencing the minds and will of his fellow-citizens on matters on which union and combination can effect great results, this is the highest mark of freedom.”

Into the 20th century, we can find reaffirmation of these views. Historian Edward Bloom writes:

Recognition of proprietary rights of authors under the Copyright Act of 1709 was an extremely important step in liberating the press. Copyright security helped to stimulate private initiative by providing authors of books some measure of financial independence. By at least partially obviating the economic function of political patrons, the Act of 1709 aided immeasurably in the freedom of the press.3

Finally, when legal scholars were just starting to develop the free speech critique of copyright, former Register of Copyrights Barbara Ringer offered these observations:

[T]he concept of copyright changed radically as a result of the revolutionary political movements of the late 18th and 19th centuries, and the first copyright statutes were based on a rejection of autocratic repression and monopoly control and upon a new recognition of individual liberty and the human rights of authors. … Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are meaningless unless authors are able to create independently from control by anyone, and to find a way to put their works before the public.4

The Engine of Free Expression

Nearly two centuries after the Bill of Rights and the first Copyright Act were passed, the Supreme Court said, “[T]he Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing a marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.”5

This metaphor, it would seem, accurately reflects the predominant historical view of copyright. Copyright and freedom of the press were seen as compatible, rather than contradictory, means to promote knowledge and learning. Liberty of the press freed the public from the caprice of the licensor, allowing diverse ideas and sentiments to disseminate. Copyright freed authors from patronage, providing security for the legal rights that encouraged devotion of time and talents to works that promote the progress of art and science.

Footnotes

  1. Copyright scholars will recognize James Thomson as the author of the poem “The Seasons“, which was the subject of two of the most important lawsuits in copyright history: Millar v. Taylor and Donaldson v. Beckett. [↩]
  2. See Connecticut Copyright Statute (1783); New Jersey Copyright Statute (1783); Massachusetts Copyright Statute (1783); New Hampshire Copyright Statute (1783); Maryland Copyright Statute (1783); Rhode Island Copyright Statute (1783); Pennsylvania Copyright Statute (1784); South Carolina Copyright Statute (1784); Virginia Copyright Statute (1785); North Carolina Copyright Statute (1785); Georgia Copyright Statute (1786); New York Copyright Statute (1786). [↩]
  3. Edward Bloom, Johnson on a Free Press: A Study in Liberty and Subordination, A Journal of English Literary History (Dec. 1949). [↩]
  4. The Demonology of Copyright, R.R. Bowker Memorial Lecture, 1974. [↩]
  5. Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 US 539, 558 (1985). [↩]
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Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Part 3

December 19, 2011 · · 3 comments

The question I’ve been asking in a series of recent posts is whether history can provide any insight into current claims that copyright law and the First Amendment conflict. As I noted, the Congress’s constitutional authority to secure exclusive rights to creators and the First Amendment’s prohibition on Congress making any laws abridging the freedom of speech and the press coexisted for nearly two centuries before any conflict between the two was suggested by scholars or considered by courts.

Surely there must be something to explain that two hundred years of near silence. And if we can explain it, we should be able to better understand how to approach current debates concerning the two areas of law.

I previously noted that copyright was primarily conceived as a property right in the 18th and 19th centuries, and invasions of property rights were not part of the freedom of the press. I also noted that before the First Amendment was ratified, a majority of the 13 original US states had passed copyright laws after providing for the freedom of the press, lending strength to the argument that the Framers conceived the two as wholly consistent.

As I’ve researched this question, I’ve realized more and more that one of the keys to understanding the history is understanding how people in the 18th and 19th centuries conceived “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press.”

There’s a certain attraction to an absolutist First Amendment: “No law” means no law.1 But that position is not very helpful, since the Amendment doesn’t define “freedom of speech” or freedom of the press. If, on the one hand, “freedom of speech” means one can say anything at anytime without facing liability, then the FDA is acting unconstitutionally when it requires pharmaceutical companies to list side effects of the medication they sell. On the other hand, if “freedom of speech” means only the freedom to agree with the government, then Congress could enact all sorts of constitutional speech regulations.2 In this sense, you could argue that everyone is a First Amendment absolutist, the disagreement is only over the meaning of “freedom of speech.”3

Freedom of the Press

“What is the liberty of the press?” asked Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, a question that best illustrates how the concept was perceived at the time.

Nowadays, it is perhaps most common to refer to the right of “free expression” as a combination of the rights of free speech and a free press.4 But when the First Amendment was adopted, freedom of press and speech were distinct enough to be mentioned separately. In a very broad sense, “freedom of the press” was the right to publish that which you had the right to speak — the liberty of the press was the expansion of the freedom of speech “by mechanical means,” as one 19th century author put it.5 Far more debate at the time centered around the meaning of the freedom or liberty of the press than the freedom of speech.

The invention of the printing press allowed the dissemination of speech on a grand scale. As a result, it was soon strictly controlled by political and religious authorities. The idea of a press free from this control in England was influenced heavily by the writings of John Milton and became a reality after the Licensing Act of 1662, which prohibited any printing without a government license, finally expired in 1695.

A full discussion on what the liberty of the press meant after this time is beyond one blog post, so I’ll focus on the key points.

First, liberty of the press, at a minimum, meant that a government could not require prior approval for someone to publish a work. William Blackstone wrote that this liberty “consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications” though it does not forbid subsequent punishment for criminal matter. The reasoning for this was that the ability to subject the press to the power of a government censor or licensor “is to subject all freedom of sentiment to the prejudices of one man, and make him the arbitrary and infallible judge of all controverted points in learning, religion, and government.”6

Thomas Paine wrote about the liberty of the press from an American perspective, explaining how the concept was a result of history:

Nothing is more common with printers, especially of newspapers, than the continual cry of the Liberty of the Press, as if because they are printers, they are to have more privileges than other people. As the term “Liberty of the Press” is adopted in this country without being understood, I will state the origin of it, and show what it means. The term comes from England, and the case was as follows:

Prior to what is in England called the revolution, which was in 1689, no work could be published in that country, without first obtaining the permission of an officer appointed by the government for inspecting works intended for publication. The same was the case in France, except that in France there were forty who were called censors, and in England there was but one, called Imprimateur.

At the revolution, the office of Imprimateur was abolished, and as works could then be published without first obtaining the permission of the government officer, the press was, in consequence of that abolition, said to be free, and it was from this circumstance that the term Liberty of the Press arose. The press, which is a tongue to the eye, was then put exactly in the case of the human tongue. A man does not ask liberty before hand to say something he has a mind to say, but he becomes answerable afterwards for the atrocities he may utter. In like manner, if a man makes the press utter atrocious things, he becomes as answerable for them as if he had uttered them by word of mouth. Mr. Jefferson has said in his inaugural speech, that “error of opinion might be tolerated, when reason was left free to combat it.” This is sound philosophy in cases of error. But there is a difference between error and licentiousness.

Some lawyers in defending their clients, for the generality of lawyers, like Swiss soldiers, will fight on either side, have often given their opinion of what they defined the liberty of the press to be. One said it was this, another said it was that, and so on, according to the case they were pleading. Now these men ought to have known that the term, liberty of the press, arose from a FACT, the abolition of the office of Imprimateur, and that opinion has nothing to do in the case. The term refers to the fact of printing free from prior restraint, and not at all to the matter printed, whether good or bad. The public at large, or in case of prosecution, a jury of the conntry, will be judges of the matter.7

This prohibition on prior restraints is at the core of the liberty of the press and the one aspect that everyone agrees on.8 What the liberty of the press means beyond that, however, was subject to great debate.

Second, this debate over the nature of the freedom of the press beyond the prohibition on prior restraints revolved largely around libel: whether defamatory, seditious, blasphemous, or obscene.9 Could government punish political criticism? Was truth a defense to published statements that injured an individual’s reputation?10 A great deal of these debates was spurred by the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which would be the most significant event in free speech history until the espionage and sedition acts passed during World War I (acts which served as the genesis for modern First Amendment jurisprudence).11

Copyright rarely entered in any of these debates, and when it did, it only did so peripherally. When Pennsylvania was discussing the ratification of the US Constitution in 1787, for example, one delegate raised the concern that, without a federal bill of rights protecting the liberty of the press, Congress might use its power to secure exclusive rights to authors not to pass a copyright law but to return to a general system of press licensing.12

But there is enough evidence to suggest that copyright law was generally — and noncontroversially — conceived of as completely outside the scope of the liberty of the press. Enjoining or restraining the publication of infringing material was a permissible prior restraint.

A Permissible Prior Restraint

The shared history of the liberty of the press and copyright law reinforces this idea.

As mentioned above, William Blackstone described the liberty of the press as “laying no previous restraints upon publications.” But elsewhere, he recognized that English courts frequently enjoined publications that infringed on copyright.

In the United States following the Revolutionary War, liberties were jealously guarded by the states. Yet six of the twelve pre-Constitution state copyright acts — Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, and South Carolina — explicitly gave the author of a work “the sole liberty of printing, reprinting, and vending” that work, suggesting that protection of copyright was compatible with the goals of a free press.

James Iredell, one of the first Supreme Court Justices of the United States, wrote in 1788 while the Constitution was undergoing ratification:

The liberty of the press is always a grand topic for declamation, but the future Congress will have no other authority over this than to secure to authors for a limited time an exclusive privilege of publishing their works. This authority has been long exercised in England, where the press is as free as among ourselves or in any country in the world; and surely such an encouragement to genius is no restraint on the liberty of the press, since men are allowed to publish what they please of their own, and so far as this may be deemed a restraint upon others it is certainly a reasonable one. [Emphasis added.]13

As noted earlier, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 triggered sharp debate over the liberty of the press. At times, copyright law was used to illustrate how that liberty was a delimited one:

When religion is concerned, Congress shall make no law respecting the subject: when the freedom of the press is concerned, Congress shall make no law abridging its freedom; but they may make any laws on the subject which do not abridge its freedom. And in fact, the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution authorizes them in express terms “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times, to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Now if Congress could not make any laws respecting the freedom of the press, they could not secure for limited times to authors their respective writings, by prohibiting those writings from being published and vended, except by those whom the authors should expressly permit.14

Louisiana, which became a state in 1812, enacted a comprehensive code of laws in 1825. The Code was largely the result of efforts by appointed Edward Livingston, a former member of the US House of Representatives and opponent of the Alien and Sedition Acts, to devise a comprehensive criminal code for the state. Though never enacted, the importance of the Code shouldn’t be underestimated.15

The Code is notable for including a section on “Offenses against the liberty of the press.” As Livingston explained in a preliminary report for the code:

It has generally been thought a sufficient protection to declare, that no punishment should be inflicted on those who legally exercise the right of publishing; but hitherto no penalties have been denounced against those who illegally abridge this liberty. Constitutional provisions are, in our republics, universally introduced to assert the right, but no sanction is given to the law. Yet do not the soundest principles require it? If the liberty of publishing be a right, is it sufficient to say that no one shall be punished for exercising it? I have a right to possess my property, yet the law does not confine itself to a declaration that I shall not be punished for using it; something more is done; and it is fenced round with penalties, imposed on those who deprive me of its enjoyment.

The Lousiana Code of 1825 made it a misdemeanor for anyone to use violence, threats, or other means to prevent a person from exercising their freedom of speech or the press. The only exception for this was the filing of a lawsuit for libel or copyright infringement.

The law also made it against the law for a judge to enjoin, restrain, or prevent the publication of any writing, punishable by a fine ranging from $500-1000 (in 1825 dollars) and a two year suspension. There was only one exception to this:

It is no infringement of the last article to grant an injunction against the publication of any literary work, on the application of a person who shall satisfy the court or judge granting the injunction, that he is the author or proprietor of the work intended to be published, and that the publication will be injurious to his rights.

Similar provisions were nearly adopted by the US Congress itself, though not for the country as a whole.

The District of Columbia was established as the capitol of the United States shortly after the Constitution was adopted and placed under the exclusive control of the federal government. For decades, efforts were made to codify the civil and criminal laws that governed the District.16

One such effort led to a proposed system of laws that was reported in a joint committee of Congress in February of 1832. This code was heavily influenced by Livingston’s Louisiana code; the provisions for offenses against the liberty of the press were imported word for word. The District of Columbia, however, declined to adopt the proposed code.

The idea of copyright as a restraint congruous with the liberty of the press continued throughout the 20th century.

For example, the following is taken from the Columbia Law Review in 1917:

In general, so highly has freedom of speech and of the press been held that, regardless of subsequent punishment, no censorship before publication has been tolerated, and, in consequence, to this day, courts will neither enjoin publications nor allow interference with them, except in the special case where written utterances are a part of a conspiracy to injure property … Similarly, the infringement of a copyright has been enjoined.17

And this is from the Supreme Court in 1971:

The Congress has authorized a strain of prior restraints against private parties in certain instances … Article I, § 8, of the Constitution authorizes Congress to secure the “exclusive right” of authors to their writings, and no one denies that a newspaper can properly be enjoined from publishing the copyrighted works of another.18

So it would seem that throughout the history of copyright, protection of an author’s exclusive rights was not seen as offensive to the freedom of the press.

Footnotes

  1. First Amendment absolutism was embraced by Supreme Court Justice Black in the mid-20th century but never accepted by courts. Today it is very much a minority view. [↩]
  2. This example isn’t hyperbole. As debates over the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 raged, newspaper editor Benjamin Russell wrote, in support of the law, that “it is patriotism to write in favor of our government — it is sedition to write against it.” [↩]
  3. See Eugene Volokh, What Part of “Make No Law” Don’t I Understand? for more about this. [↩]
  4. See, for example, Connick v. Myers, 461 US 138, 154 (1983); United States v. O’Brien, 391 US 367, 377 (1968); New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 US 254, 285 (1964). [↩]
  5. James Paterson, The Liberty of the Press, Speech, and Public Worship, pg. 14, (London, 1880); See generally Eugene Volokh, “The Freedom … of the Press”, From 1791 to 1868 to Now — Freedom of the Press as an Industry, or the Press as a Technology? 160 University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2011). [↩]
  6. Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 4, Ch. 11. [↩]
  7. The Political Writings of Thomas Paine Volume 2, pp. 464-65 (J.P. Mendum, ed. 1859). [↩]
  8. See James Wilson, Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention, December 1, 1787: “What is meant by the liberty of the press is, that there should be no antecedent restraint upon it; but that every author is responsible when he attacks the security or welfare of the government, or the safety, character, and property of the individual.”; Respublica v. Oswald, 1 US 319 (1788); Henry Lee, Report of the Minority on the Virginia Resolutions, J. House of Delegates (Va.), 6:93-9522 January 22, 1799, “In fact the liberty of the press is a term which has a definite and appropriate signification, completely understood. It signifies a liberty to publish, free from previous restraint, any thing and every thing at the discretion of the printer only, but not the liberty of spreading with impunity false and scandalous slanders which may destroy the peace and mangle the reputation of an individual or of a community.”; Commonwealth v. Blanding, 3 Pick. 304 (Mass. 1825); “Besides, it is well understood, and received as a commentary on this provision for the liberty of the press, that it was intended to prevent all such previous restraints upon publications as had been practised by other governments, and in early times here, to stifle the efforts of patriots towards enlightening their fellow subjects upon their rights and the duties of rulers. The liberty of the press was to be unrestrained, but he who used it was to be responsible in case of its abuse; like the right to keep fire arms, which does not protect him who uses them for annoyance or destruction.”; Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 1833: “That this amendment was intended to secure to every citizen an absolute right to speak, or write, or print, whatever he might please, without any responsibility, public or private, therefor, is a supposition too wild to be indulged by any rational man. … the language of this amendment imports no more, than that every man shall have a right to speak, write, and print his opinions upon any subject whatsoever, without any prior restraint, so always, that he does not injure any other person in his rights, person, property, or reputation; and so always, that he does not thereby disturb the public peace, or attempt to subvert the government. It is neither more nor less, than an expansion of the great doctrine, recently brought into operation in the law of libel, that every man shall be at liberty to publish what is true, with good motives and for justifiable ends.”; Patterson v. Colorado, 205 US 454, 462 (1907). [↩]
  9. See Henry Schofield, 2 Essays on Constitutional Law and Equity 514-29 (1921). [↩]
  10. See Eugene Volokh, The Original Meaning of the Free Speech/Press Clause, Sept. 15, 2008. [↩]
  11. See Steven G. Gey, The Brandenburg Paradigm and Other First Amendments, 12 Journal of Constitutional Law 971, 975 (2010). [↩]
  12. “Tho’ it is not declared that Congress have a power to destroy the liberty of the press; yet, in effect, they will have it. For they will have the powers of self-preservation. They have a power to secure to authors the right of their writings. Under this, they may license the press no doubt; and under licensing the press, they may suppress it.” Robert Whitehill, remarks of December 1, 1787, in Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution 1787-1788, pg 771. [↩]
  13. Answers to Mr. Mason’s Objections to the New Constitution Recommended by the Late Convention at Philadelphia, in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States, pg. 361. [↩]
  14. Remarks of George Taylor, December 21, 1798, The Virginia Report of 1799-1900, Touching the Alien and Sedition Laws; Together with the Virginia Resolutions of December 21, 1798, pg. 136. [↩]
  15. Stuart P. Green, The Louisiana Criminal Code: Ten Proposals for Reform, 2002. [↩]
  16. Justice Walter S. Cox, Efforts to Obtain a Code of Laws for the District of Columbia, 1898. [↩]
  17. Constitutional Protection of the Right of Freedom of Speech and of the Press 17 Columbia Law Review 622-24 (Nov. 1917). [↩]
  18. New York Times v. United States, 403 US 713, 731 n.1 (1971)(J. White dissent). [↩]
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Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Part 2

December 08, 2011 · · 7 comments

Last week I began writing about the unexplored history surrounding copyright law and the First Amendment. To sum up: in the past four decades, there has been a lot of scholarship concerning a potential conflict between the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution and the free speech and press protections of the First Amendment. Since then, courts have also dealt with the interplay of the two — most notably the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft.

But before than — nothing. Nearly two whole centuries passed from when the Copyright Clause and First Amendment became the law of the land until Melville Nimmer wrote Does Copyright Abridge the First Amendment Guarantees of Free Speech and Press? in 1970.

History gives us very little reason why this is. Discussion and debates surrounding First Amendment’s adoption are “void of any reference to its relationship with provisions of the original Constitution such as the Copyright Clause.”1

As a result, most of the academic attention on the subject has relied on things other than history to examine the perceived conflict. Courts too — Eldred devoted only two sentences to the history of the two clauses: “The Copyright Clause and First Amendment were adopted close in time. This proximity indicates that, in the Framers’ view, copyright’s limited monopolies are compatible with free speech principles.”

I think history can shed some light on this “unbroken practice” of copyright and free speech coexisting.2 Last time, I noted that one of the reasons that may explain why little was said on the subject for nearly two centuries was that a copyright was generally conceived of as a property right, and the liberty of the press did not extend to invasions of property rights.

Is Copyright Law Unconstitutional?

Today, I want to point out a specific claim that is not supported by history.

In a recent post, Stephan Kinsella puts out a version of the claim:

Clearly copyright is form of censorship. Clearly the First Amendment prohibits federal censorship laws. So: the First Amendment later, and thus implicitly repealed the copyright clause. Or at least the copyright act–the way it’s implemented to permit books to be banned and movies burned.

The more I think about this, the more I think it’s correct. There is a tension between copyright’s censorship, and the free speech and free press protections in the First Amendment (as there is a “tension” between antitrust and IP law). But since the free speech provisions came later, in case of conflict, they prevail. Copyright has to go. It is unconstitutional.

Kinsella is not the first to say this. For example, this is from a 1986 law review article: “Arguably, then, the [Copyright] Act is unconstitutional, since the free speech guarantee is an amendment which supersedes prior inconsistent constitutional text.”3

Other free speech critics of copyright law, while not adopting the view that the First Amendment rendered the Copyright Clause unconstitutional, use the timing of the two provisions to raise uncertainty in the arena.4 In general, however, speculation concerning the constitutional firmity of Congress’s copyright power is a minority view.5

Respected constitutional scholar William W. Van Alstyne points out that “certainly nothing on [the First Amendment's] face suggests that it in any respect ‘amends’ (that is, displaces) [the Copyright Clause].”6 Later amendments don’t repeal Constitutional provisions unless the repeal is explicit (as with the Twenty-First Amendment) or self-evident (as with the Seventeenth Amendment).7

Freedom of the Press and Copyright Before the Constitution

But there’s an even more compelling reason why the subsequent adoption of the First Amendment wouldn’t have or wasn’t intended to impact Congress’s copyright authority at the time.

Twelve of the original thirteen US states (Delaware was the lone exception) adopted copyright acts between 1783 and 1786 — before the current Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation.

Of those twelve colonies, five of them provided for the freedom of the press in either their state constitutions or separate bills of rights before passing their own copyright laws: Virginia,8 Pennsylvania,9 Georgia,10 South Carolina,11 and Massachusetts.12

Two of the colonies did not enact freedom of the press clauses until after passing their own copyright acts13 while the remaining five did not include “bill of rights” style provisions in their constitutions prior to the ratification of the US Constitution.14

So by the time delegates arrived to draft the US Constitution, over one third of the states had enacted copyright legislation after providing for freedom of the press. This lends solid support to the idea that early US copyright law was perceived as being wholly consistent with the guarantee of a free press.

Footnotes

  1. Joseph P. Bauer, Copyright and the First Amendment: Comrades, Combatants, or Uneasy Allies? 67 Washington and Lee Law Review 831, 839 n.28 (2010). [↩]
  2. To be clear: right now I’m only seeking to describe the historical relationship between copyright and free speech, not make any arguments about how courts and policy makers should treat the relationship today. I think history can inform the approach to that relationship, but I don’t want to give the impression that I’m arguing that ”this is how it was, so this is how it should always be.” [↩]
  3. David E. Shipley, Conflicts Between Copyright and the First Amendment After Harper & Row, Publishers v. Nation Enterprises, 1986 BYU Law Review 983, 985 (1986). [↩]
  4. See, for example, Joseph P. Bauer, Copyright and the First Amendment: Comrades, Combatants, or Uneasy Allies? 67 Washington and Lee Law Review 831, 839 (2010). [↩]
  5. “The view of the First Amendment entirely displacing the earlier text is universally rejected, I think properly, as to copyright.” C. Edwin Baker, First Amendment Limits on Copyright, 55 Vanderbilt Law Review 891, 893 (2002). [↩]
  6. Reconciling What the First Amendment Forbids With What the Copyright Clause Permits: A Summary Explanation and Review, 66 Law and Contemporary Problems 225, 226 (2003). [↩]
  7. See Joseph Blocher, Amending the Exceptions Clause, 92 Minnesota Law Review 971, 980-82 (2008). [↩]
  8. “XII That the freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.” Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776 (Virginia Copyright Act, October 1, 1785). [↩]
  9. “XII. That the people have a right to freedom of speech, and of writing, and publishing their sentiments; therefore the freedom of the press ought not to be restrained.” Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, Declaration of Rights, September 28, 1776 (Pennsylvania Copyright Act, March 15, 1784). [↩]
  10. “Article LXI. Freedom of the press and trial by jury to remain inviolate forever.” Georgia Constitution, February 1777 (Georgia Copyright Act, February 3, 1786). [↩]
  11. “XLIII. That the liberty of the press be inviolably preserved.” Constitution of South Carolina, March 19, 1778 (South Carolina Copyright Act, March 26, 1784). [↩]
  12. “Article XVI. The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state: it ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this commonwealth.” Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, October 25, 1780 (Massachusetts Copyright Act, March 17, 1783). [↩]
  13. New Hampshire — “Article 22. The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state: It ought, therefore, to be inviolably preserved.” New Hampshire Constitution, June 2, 1784 (New Hampshire Copyright Act, November 7, 1783); and North Carolina —  “16. That the people have a right to freedom of speech, and of writing and publishing their sentiments; that freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and ought not to be violated.” North Carolina Ratifying Convention, Declaration of Rights and Other Amendments, August 1, 1788 (North Carolina Copyright Act, November 19, 1785). [↩]
  14. Connecticut, which passed the first colonial copyright act, operated under the 1662 Charter of the Colony of Connecticut until 1818. Rhode Island similarly operated under its 1663 Royal Charter until it adopted a constitution in 1842. Maryland, New Jersey, and New York did not expressly mention freedom of the press in their original constitutions. [↩]
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