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

By , November 22, 2011.

“If you would understand anything,” said Aristotle, “observe its beginning and its development.”

Understanding the historical relationship between copyright and the First Amendment is especially relevant today, with free speech concerns raised over pending rogue sites legislation — the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House — and domain name seizures — the Second Circuit will be hearing arguments about whether the seizure of the Rojadirecta domain names constitute a prior restraint in December.

Copyright law has long provided for preliminary injunctive relief (I believe the provisions of PROTECT IP and SOPA can be seen as a species of preliminary injunctive relief), and to a lesser extent, seizure and forfeiture. Over much of the 20th century, courts have turned to the First Amendment to strengthen procedural requirements in cases involving obscenity, libel, or news reporting. Yet preliminary relief for copyright infringement — whether injunctive, through actual seizures, or otherwise — has remained immune from any successful procedural First Amendment challenge.

Why is this?

The question is difficult to answer because most of the attention on the relationship between copyright and free speech has come only recently. Until the late 1960s, the idea that there exists any tension between the First Amendment’s prohibition on government restrictions of expression and copyright law’s encouragement of expression was nearly nonexistent. Since then, however, and especially after the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Copyright Term Extension Act in the late 1990s, many have turned their attention to finding contradictions between free speech and copyright. 1More detail on the history of copyright and First Amendment scholarship at my post, Copyright and Censorship.

While the focus on contradictions is recent, earlier scholars had noted that copyright infringement at the very least plays by different rules when it comes to the First Amendment:

It is quite evident that no new principles of liberty were intended to be set forth by the First Amendment, and that, however enticing a philosophical theory of freedom of the press and of speech may be, the guaranty must be construed with reference to the common law which gave it birth. When Blackstone declared in 1769 that the liberty of the press consisted in placing no previous restraints upon publications, he was not laying down a new principle of constitutional theory, but merely stating what he believed to be the existing law. Apparently his generalization was too broad. Injunctions against the infringement of a copyright were not infrequent in his day. 2Freedom of the Press and the Injunction, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 13, No. 8, pp. 732-734 (Dec. 1913).

This quote suggests that the reason why equitable remedies for copyright infringement — injunctions and seizures especially — have withstood First Amendment scrutiny where those same remedies would fail in other cases remains somewhat of a mystery.

The beginnings and development of copyright and the First Amendment are still under-observed: Eldred v. Ashcroft devoted a scant two sentences to that history to show that, since the Copyright Act of 1790 and the First Amendment were adopted close in time, they are compatible.

I believe a closer look at the historical record can shed more light on this mystery (though I don’t mean to suggest in any way that I am the first to do so). 3See, for example, Edward Lee, Guns and Speech Technologies: How the Right to Bear Arms Affects Copyright Regulations of Speech Technologies (2008) — and I’m always interested in learning about other examples. I think this historical record shows a number of reasons why copyright law, though not “categorically immune from challenges under the First Amendment”, 4Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 US 186, 221 (2003). has nevertheless existed comfortably alongside the First Amendment.

The first reason is that legal thinkers primarily conceived of copyright as a property right. Property is on the same footing as life and liberty. Freedom of speech, or freedom of the press, ends where deprivation of property begins.

Literary Property

Of course, any mention of “copyright” and “property” in the same sentence nowadays can cause some to go in a tizzy. Partly this is due to an impoverished concept of property; that property only refers to tangible objects (forgetting about intangibles like stocks, bonds, promissory notes, and other financial instruments), or that copyright can’t be property because infringement doesn’t deprive the holder of possession or ownership (except if I smash your car window, we’d say I violated your property rights even though you still possess the same amount of glass). Setting aside these naive arguments, the modern critique of copyright as property goes something like this: Although it is entirely correct to characterize copyright as property in a descriptive sense, we shouldn’t characterize copyright as property in a normative sense, because that would be bad, from a policy standpoint. 5See, for example, William Patry, Does it matter if copyright is property? Patry Copyright Blog, June 20, 2006, “What those who seek to have copyright classified as property is clear enough though: Blackstonian sole dominion, justified by the very classification of property … But what if copyright is just a tort, as indeed courts refer to it as. Might that not lead to consideration of things in a different light, one that involves more of the balancing of interests one typically sees, say in, negligence actions, a Coase Theorem of copyright?”;  Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyright as Cudgel, Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 2, 2002. “We make a grave mistake when we choose to engage in discussions of copyright in terms of ‘property.’ Copyright is not about ‘property’ as commonly understood. It is a specific state-granted monopoly issued for particular policy reasons.” These arguments are beyond the scope of this article — I’m concerned with whether copyright was thought of as property when the First Amendment was first enacted.

Indeed it was. In 1792, James Madison wrote that “property” has a “larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage“; this meaning includes more than just “a man’s land, or merchandize, or money.” 6James Madison, Property. Legal scholar Adam Mossoff describes this concept of property as the “dominant” understanding of property in 18th and 19th century America. 7Is Copyright Property? 42 San Diego Law Review 29, 41 (2005).

And copyright certainly fit within this understanding of property at the time — it was referred to as “literary property” more often than not. Copyright was expressly described as property in several of the State copyright acts that predated the US Constitution. 8“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 sciencs: 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.” Massachusetts Copyright Statute (1783), New Hampshire Copyright Statute (1783), Rhode Island Copyright Statute (1783).

“An act for securing to the authors of literary works an exclusive property therein for a limited time.” Virginia Copyright Statute (1785) (title).

“An Act for securing Literary Property: 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.” North Carolina Copyright Statute (1785). The Supreme Court has classified and referred to copyright as property throughout its history — in 1823, for example, the Court stated, “The protection of property should extend as well to one subject as to another: to that which results from improvements, made under the faith of titles emanating from the government, as to a proprietary interest in the soil, derived from the same source. It extends to literary property, the fruit of mental labour.” 9Green v. Biddle, 21 US 1, 57; See also Wheaton v. Peters, 33 US 591 (1834), discussing whether “literary property” is perpetual under copyright statute; Stephens v. Cady, 55 US 528, 531 (1853), speaking of the “property in the copy-right”; Canal Co. v. Clark, 80 US 311, 322 (1872), noting the “property” that exists “in copyrights”; Baker v. Selden, 101 US 99, 102 (1880), describing copyright as “exclusive property”; Holmes v. Hurst, 174 US 82, 86 (1899), explaining the nature of the “property” protected by copyright; Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus, 210 US 339, 346 (1908), referring to “copyright property”; Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal, 286 US 123, 127 (1932), “The production to which the protection of copyright may be accorded is the property of the author and not of the United States”; Dowling v. United States, 473 US 207, 217 (1985), exploring the “property rights of a copyright holder”; Stewart v. Abend, 495 US 207, 223 (1990), “the aspects of a derivative work added by the derivative author are that author’s property”.

In 1839, the New York Chancery Court decided Brandreth v. Lance, a libel case and “the first American court decision setting aside a government action on constitutional free speech or free press grounds.” 10Eugene Volokh, Flag Burning and Free Speech, Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009. But in refusing to enjoin the libelous publication, the court implicitly notes that an injunction for copyright infringement would not infringe upon the liberty of the press:

It is very evident that this court cannot assume jurisdiction of the case presented by the complainant’s bill, or of any other case of the like nature, without infringing upon the liberty of the press, and attempting to exercise a power of preventive justice which, as the legislature has decided, cannot safely be entrusted to any tribunal consistently with the principles of a free government. This bill presents the simple case of an application to the court of chancery to restrain the publication of a pamphlet which purports to be a literary work, undoubtedly a tale of fiction, on the ground that it is intended as a libel upon the complainant. …

The utmost extent to which the court of chancery has ever gone in restraining any publication by injunction, has been upon the principle of protecting the rights of property. …

But it may, perhaps, be doubted whether his lordship in that case did not, to some extent, endanger the freedom of the press by assuming jurisdiction of the case as a matter of property merely, when in fact the object of the complainant’s bill was not to prevent the publication of her letters on account of any supposed interest she had in them as literary property, but to restrain the publication of a private correspondence, as a matter of feeling only. His decision in that case has, however, as I see, received the unqualified approbation of the learned American commentator on equity jurisprudence. 11Brandreth v. Lance, 8 Paige Ch. 24, 26 (N.Y. Ch. 1839).

The court also notes in a footnote, “There is, perhaps, but one instance in the books, of any judge having maintained the existence of a power in the court of chancery of restraining publications on any other ground, but that of property and copyright” (Emphasis added).

Liberty of the Press does not Limit Copyright Injunctions

The idea that copyright is a property right and injunctions to protect property rights do not infringe free speech remained throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. The Columbia Law Review wrote in 1913:

This immunity from an injunction, while applicable to libels, is not similarly applicable to other forms of injurious publications where the historical requirement of a jury trial is not so pressing. Accordingly, where the act of publication results in intimidation and coercion it is treated as an ordinary crime, and the liberty of the press does not then limit the jurisdiction of equity to protect property. Furthermore, according to the prevailing view, it seems that a publication, no matter how innocent in itself, may be enjoined if it is made in pursuance of a scheme which has an enjoinable element. Thus, although the courts are at variance as to whether an injunction may issue against a boycott, they are agreed that wherever such is the case, publications in aid thereof, even if libels, cannot claim the protection of the guaranty. In establishing this doctrine they assert that the right to engage in a lawful occupation is not less essential than that of free speech. In order, therefore, to obtain the greatest possible freedom of action and speech equally for all, these conflicting constitutional rights must be exercised in accordance with the maxim, Sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas. Certainly, the press should not be employed unjustifiably to ruin another’s occupation, and where such ruin is imminent the injunction, though a dangerous weapon, becomes a proper one [Emphasis added]. 12Freedom of the Press and the Injunction, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 13, No. 8, pp. 732-734 (Dec. 1913); See also Constitutional Protection of the Right of Freedom of Speech and of the Press, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 622-624 (Nov. 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 [Emphasis added].” The footnote following this text reads, “When the publication was a petition repudiated by its signers, an injunction was granted on the basis of property right in the signature. Similarly, the infringement of a copyright has been enjoined”; The Americana: A universal reference library, comprising the arts and sciences, literature, history, biography, geography, commerce, etc., of the world, Volume 12, “Press, Freedom of the”, George Edwin Rines editor (1908): “Such legal checks [on the liberty of the press] as remain are merely intended to prevent outrages of religion or decency, to protect subjects from defamation, and to conserve the copyright of authors.”

And in 1971, Justice White of the Supreme Court itself weighed in, noting that “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.” 13New York Times v. U.S., 403 US 713, J. White, concurrence, n.1 (1971).

Today, preliminary injunctions are common in copyright cases, and seizures of infringing goods are common, both through courts and administrative agencies. At the same time, while defendants have increasingly raised First Amendment defenses in the past 40 years, those defenses have almost without exception been unsuccessful. 14I provided examples in previous posts, including ICE Seizures Criticism: Magic Words, Responding to Sellars: Copyright and Content-based Regulations, and Rojadirecta seeks refuge in First Amendment.

Call it what you will — a permissible prior restraint, a First Amendment exception, or a recognition of competing liberty interests — there is an unbroken historical practice of providing remedies for copyright infringement that would constitutionally fail in other areas of the law. This practice is premised in part on the view that copyright is a property right, and freedom of expression does not shield a defendant from invasions of property rights. As seen above, this premise appears to be established by the time of Blackstone’s Commentaries and has been alluded to several times since then.

Unbroken historical practice is obviously not ipse dixit proof of the constitutional firmity of a practice. But the development of the historical practice does increase our understanding of these issues today. Also, as mentioned earlier, the historical record reveals other reasons why the conflict that critics see between free speech and copyright has not been embraced by courts, reasons that I hope to write about in future posts.

References

References
↑1 More detail on the history of copyright and First Amendment scholarship at my post, Copyright and Censorship.
↑2 Freedom of the Press and the Injunction, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 13, No. 8, pp. 732-734 (Dec. 1913).
↑3 See, for example, Edward Lee, Guns and Speech Technologies: How the Right to Bear Arms Affects Copyright Regulations of Speech Technologies (2008) — and I’m always interested in learning about other examples.
↑4 Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 US 186, 221 (2003).
↑5 See, for example, William Patry, Does it matter if copyright is property? Patry Copyright Blog, June 20, 2006, “What those who seek to have copyright classified as property is clear enough though: Blackstonian sole dominion, justified by the very classification of property … But what if copyright is just a tort, as indeed courts refer to it as. Might that not lead to consideration of things in a different light, one that involves more of the balancing of interests one typically sees, say in, negligence actions, a Coase Theorem of copyright?”;  Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyright as Cudgel, Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 2, 2002. “We make a grave mistake when we choose to engage in discussions of copyright in terms of ‘property.’ Copyright is not about ‘property’ as commonly understood. It is a specific state-granted monopoly issued for particular policy reasons.”
↑6 James Madison, Property.
↑7 Is Copyright Property? 42 San Diego Law Review 29, 41 (2005).
↑8 “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 sciencs: 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.” Massachusetts Copyright Statute (1783), New Hampshire Copyright Statute (1783), Rhode Island Copyright Statute (1783).

“An act for securing to the authors of literary works an exclusive property therein for a limited time.” Virginia Copyright Statute (1785) (title).

“An Act for securing Literary Property: 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.” North Carolina Copyright Statute (1785).

↑9 Green v. Biddle, 21 US 1, 57; See also Wheaton v. Peters, 33 US 591 (1834), discussing whether “literary property” is perpetual under copyright statute; Stephens v. Cady, 55 US 528, 531 (1853), speaking of the “property in the copy-right”; Canal Co. v. Clark, 80 US 311, 322 (1872), noting the “property” that exists “in copyrights”; Baker v. Selden, 101 US 99, 102 (1880), describing copyright as “exclusive property”; Holmes v. Hurst, 174 US 82, 86 (1899), explaining the nature of the “property” protected by copyright; Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus, 210 US 339, 346 (1908), referring to “copyright property”; Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal, 286 US 123, 127 (1932), “The production to which the protection of copyright may be accorded is the property of the author and not of the United States”; Dowling v. United States, 473 US 207, 217 (1985), exploring the “property rights of a copyright holder”; Stewart v. Abend, 495 US 207, 223 (1990), “the aspects of a derivative work added by the derivative author are that author’s property”.
↑10 Eugene Volokh, Flag Burning and Free Speech, Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009.
↑11 Brandreth v. Lance, 8 Paige Ch. 24, 26 (N.Y. Ch. 1839).
↑12 Freedom of the Press and the Injunction, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 13, No. 8, pp. 732-734 (Dec. 1913); See also Constitutional Protection of the Right of Freedom of Speech and of the Press, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 622-624 (Nov. 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 [Emphasis added].” The footnote following this text reads, “When the publication was a petition repudiated by its signers, an injunction was granted on the basis of property right in the signature. Similarly, the infringement of a copyright has been enjoined”; The Americana: A universal reference library, comprising the arts and sciences, literature, history, biography, geography, commerce, etc., of the world, Volume 12, “Press, Freedom of the”, George Edwin Rines editor (1908): “Such legal checks [on the liberty of the press] as remain are merely intended to prevent outrages of religion or decency, to protect subjects from defamation, and to conserve the copyright of authors.”
↑13 New York Times v. U.S., 403 US 713, J. White, concurrence, n.1 (1971).
↑14 I provided examples in previous posts, including ICE Seizures Criticism: Magic Words, Responding to Sellars: Copyright and Content-based Regulations, and Rojadirecta seeks refuge in First Amendment.

Copyright and Censorship

By , January 25, 2011.

On January 19, 2011, members of New York City’s theater community and human rights supporters gathered to mark the one month anniversary of Belarus’ contested presidential election. The election was widely condemned as fraudulent, accompanied by the arrests of many peaceful protesters in Belarus with thousands more beaten.

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Members of the Belarus Free Theatre joined the gathering, having recently wrapped up a show in the City. In Europe’s last dictatorship, the Belarus Free Theatre is illegal. Shows are held in secret, with theater members and audiences subject to arrest. The members are barred from attending state universities or working in state employment. When the Belarus Free Theatre left for New York, they did so in the middle of the night, hidden in car trunks in order to avoid detection by the government. Once in the US, they heard news of their homes being ransacked, and their children being declared orphans — the government considering them “dead to the state.” The members fear arrest once they return to Belarus. 1For more on Belarus and the Belarus Free Theatre, see Zone of Silence; Why Belarus Free Theatre deserves a standing ovation; and Police ‘threatened to rape’ Belarus Free Theatre director after election protest.

Their crime? Performing theater.

That’s censorship.

Enforcing copyright law — whether through DMCA takedown notices, domain  name seizures, etc — is not in the same league. Yet, copyright critics almost reflexively apply the label of “censorship” to any attempt at better protecting the rights of creators.

I’ve written about free speech and copyright several times in the past: noting the sometimes shaky relationship between artistic expression, the first amendment, and copyright; discussing the chilling effect of copyright infringement and the oft-forgotten speech interests of creators; and examining first amendment arguments against COICA and domain name seizures.

Today, I want to put a bookend on these previous discussions of free speech and copyright by looking at some of the broader issues in the debate.

On Censorship

The “copyright as censorship” comparison permeates much of the discussion surrounding free speech and copyright. It’s often noted that early copyright law grew out of press licensing statutes that were passed to both protect proprietary rights of book publishers and allow governments to control seditious publications. The dual purpose of copyright law at the time is probably more coincidental than anything; France, for example, had no copyright law at that time, yet still maintained censorship over the press. 2Visit Voltaire: Voltaire Bio. Nevertheless, copyright law today is completely divorced from any sort of government control over content. If copyright is censorship, it hardly resembles the type of censorship the Belarus Free Theatre faces.

Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II described what he calls the “typical censorship situation” and its associated dangers in a 1964 dissent:

In the typical censorship situation material is brought as a matter of course before some administrative authority, who then decides on its propriety. This means that the State establishes an administrative structure whereby all writings are reviewed before publication. By contrast, if the State uses its penal system to punish expression outside permissible bounds, the State does not comprehensively review any form of expression; it merely considers after the event utterances it has reason to suppose may be prohibited. The breadth of its review of expression is therefore much narrower and the danger that protected expression will be repressed is less.

…

There are built-in elements in any system of licensing or censorship, the tendency of which is to encourage restrictions of expression. The State is not compelled to make an initial decision to pursue a course of action, since the original burden is on the citizen to bring a piece of writing before it. The censor is a part of the executive structure, and there is at least some danger that he will develop an institutionalized bias in favor of censorship because of his particular responsibility. In a criminal proceeding, however, the burden is on the State to act, the decision-maker belongs to an independent branch of the government, and neither a judge nor a juror has any personal interest in active censorship.

…

One danger of a censorship system is that the public may never be aware of what an administrative agent refuses to permit to be published or distributed. A penal sanction assures both that some overt thing has been done by the accused and that the penalty is imposed for an activity that is not concealed from the public. In this case, the information charged that obscene books were possessed or kept for sale and distribution; presumably such possession, if knowing, could, as a constitutional matter, support a criminal prosecution. The procedure adopted by the State envisions that a full judicial hearing will be held on the obscenity issue. Finally, the federal system makes it highly unlikely that the citizenry of one State will be unaware of the kind of material that is being restricted by its own government when there is great divergence among the policies of the various States and a high degree of communication across state lines. 3Harlan dissent, Quantity of Copies of Books v. Kansas, 378 US 205, 222-24 (1964).

Thankfully, this “typical censorship situation” is largely an anachronism in the US today. It is worth noting some of Harlan’s points about what makes administrative censorship so dangerous to free expression, especially an institutionalized bias in favor of active censorship. Also notable is the distinction between executive censor and criminal proceeding — with less danger of restrictions on expression under the latter. This danger is attenuated further when we’re in a civil proceeding between two private parties, as most copyright infringement cases are.

However, what Harlan doesn’t talk about in this particular passage is the sine qua non of censorship: restricting expression because of disagreement over its content. Government censorship is typically targeted at suppressing politically dissident speech, or obscene and other “inappropriate” speech. This is where copyright as censorship arguments falter. It’s illogical to say that enforcement of piracy is based on a disagreement about the content — a copyright owner agrees completely with the content. 4Schnapper v. Foley, 667 F.2d 102 (DC Cir 1981), discusses the hypothetical situation of the government using copyright as a pretext for actual censorship. The court said, “Underlying the appellants’ First Amendment assault on the copyright obtained for ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ is their professed concern that the Government may one day attempt to use the copyright law as an instrument of censorship … We are aware that there is at least a theoretical possibility that some copyright laws may be used by some nations as instruments of censorship … We are unaware, however, of any effort on the part of the United States Government to throttle free expression through use of the copyright laws, and we are not inclined to hypothesize such an effort nor to hand down a decision invalidating an act of Congress on that hypothetical basis … We are confident that should the day come when the Government denies someone access to a work produced at its direction on the basis of a copyright, and if the doctrine of fair use and the distinction between an idea and its expression fail to vindicate adequately that person’s interests — although we have no reason to believe that they would — the courts of the United States would on the basis of facts, not hypotheses, consider afresh the First Amendment interests implicated thereby.” Cases of creative or transformative infringement do sometimes present issues where a copyright owner sues to stop a subsequent use she disagrees with, but as we’ll see, the doctrine of fair use provides a safeguard against censorship.

Prior Restraints

Closely related to censorship is the idea of “prior restraints.” In the First Amendment realm, prior restraints — suppression of speech before a final judicial determination that it is unprotected speech — are considered worse than punishment after speech has been made. 5Blackstone defined freedom of the press as freedom solely from prior restraints, “not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published.” Courts consequently take a deeply skeptical look at any type of law or regulation that resembles a prior restraint. This includes preliminary injunctions in civil lawsuits because they are granted only on the basis that speech is likely to be unprotected.

Yet courts routinely award preliminary injunctions in copyright infringement cases. The Supreme Court has even gone so far as to say that “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.” 6New York Times v. US, 403 US 713, White concurrence n.1 (1971).

What is it that makes courts treat copyright cases differently than other speech cases? The following excerpt provides a hint:

Moreover, freedom of thought and expression “includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.” We do not suggest this right not to speak would sanction abuse of the copyright owner’s monopoly as an instrument to suppress facts. But in the words of New York’s Chief Judge Fuld:

“The essential thrust of the First Amendment is to prohibit improper restraints on the voluntary public expression of ideas; it shields the man who wants to speak or publish when others wish him to be quiet. There is necessarily, and within suitably defined areas, a concomitant freedom not to speak publicly, one which serves the same ultimate end as freedom of speech in its affirmative aspect.”

Courts and commentators have recognized that copyright, and the right of first publication in particular, serve this countervailing First Amendment value. 7Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 US 539, 559-60 (1985).

First Amendment Opportunism

Before delving into the issue of the First Amendment and copyright, I want to take a quick look at the issue of “First Amendment opportunism.” 8A term coined by Frederick Schauer in First Amendment Opportunism. Free speech is one of the foundations of a democratic society. Censorship, the kind the Belarus Free Theatre faces, is ugly. As we’ll see, the question of whether copyright law adequately accounts for free speech is increasingly being asked, as well it should. But coloring the debate by alleging censorship — comparing the removal of a dancing baby video from a corporate video site to violent suppression of political dissidents — is a damaging use of hyperbole. It both minimizes the horrors of true censorship and paints opponents as evil rather than wrong.

At the same time, such language is merely an outgrowth of First Amendment opportunism in the copyright realm. What do I mean by this?

In some ways, the First Amendment is the “won’t somebody think of the children” of the legal world.

First Amendment scholar Frederick Schauer explains, “[T]he First Amendment, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press provide considerable rhetorical power and argumentative authority. The individual or group gaining the support of the First Amendment often believes, and often correctly, that it has secured the upper hand in public debate. The First Amendment not only attracts attention, but also appears to strike fear in the hearts of many who do not want to be seen as being against it.” Schauer calls this “First Amendment magnetism” and says it “leads strategic actors to gravitate to it as easily as politicians gravitate to the flag, motherhood, and apple pie.”

The magnetic force of the First Amendment generates two distinct phenomena. First, actors in the public arena (defined here to exclude the courts) are likely to rely on the First Amendment in pressing their causes, in the often-justified expectation that doing so will disproportionately, compared to relying on other dimensions of the law, attract allies, generate favorable attention by the press, and arouse the sympathies of other public actors. Second, lawyers representing clients with claims and causes not necessarily lying within the First Amendment’s core or traditional concerns will add First Amendment arguments and claims to their core claims, or will modify their core claims to connect them with First Amendment arguments, all in the hope that doing so will increase the probability of their success. 9Frederick Schauer, The Boundaries of the First Amendment: A Preliminary Exploration of Constitutional Salience, 117 Harvard Law Review 1765 (2004).

David McGowan has attributed much of the growing trend in constitutionalizing copyright to this First Amendment magnetism. He notes:

Many copyright scholars object to the way Congress deals with their subject. With good reason, they feel Congress wields a copyright ratchet: terms get longer, and the scope of rights gets wider, but never the reverse. The rare exception occurs when publishers ask Congress to shore up fair use rights to make it easier for authors to get information they need to produce works. On this account, Congress is simply a tool rich media conglomerates use to soak consumers, who are rationally ignorant of the shameless fleecing their “representatives” give them.

It’s no fun beating one’s head against a wall. So if the representative branches sell out, at least by academic standards, their power to do harm must be limited. Two things are needed: a non-representative forum, to limit the power of producer wealth, and a law that trumps Congress’s Article I power to grant exclusive rights to authors. The First Amendment seems like just the thing. Like copyright, it deals with expression, which makes almost any argument facially plausible. More importantly, in a conflict with Congress’s Article I power, the First Amendment trumps. 10David McGowan, Why the First Amendment Cannot Dictate Copyright Policy, 65 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 281 (2004).

This isn’t to say that First Amendment magnetism is the same as naked opportunism, though it’s worth noting that this opportunistic use of free speech shows its head in practice. In 1879, one writer observed that “the ever active demagogue has been able to frame a cry of “free books for free men.” It is wonderful what an amount of things “free” men are entitled to have free. Free books, free and unlimited currency, free support from the State, etc., are supposed to have some connection with free speech, freedom of religion, and free trade, and therefore to be proper and valid cries. 11Book Notices, 391 Yale Literary Journal 287 (April 1879). Courts have called out alleged infringers for “hiding behind the first amendment.” 12Sid & Marty Krofft Television v. McDonald’s, 562 F.2d 1157, 1170-71 (9th Cir 1977), referring to Duchess Music Corp. v. Stern, 458 F.2d 1305, 1310-11 (9 Cir. 1972); United States v. Bodin, 375 F.Supp. 1265, 1267-68 (W.D.Okl.1974);McGraw Hill, Inc. v. Worth Publishers, Inc., 335 F.Supp. 415, 422 (S.D.N.Y.1971) and Walt Disney Productions v. Air Pirates, 345 F.Supp. 108 (N.D.Cal.1972). Even free speech critics have made note of a naked First Amendment opportunism. L. Ray Patterson notes that courts have consistently rejected First Amendment defenses in infringement actions but states that “in general, these cases were sound in rejecting the free speech defense as being the last refuge of an infringing scoundrel.” 13Free Speech, Copyright, and Fair Use, 40 Vanderbilt Law Review 1, 36 n.110 (1987).

What we’re talking about here is an opportunism in the nonpejorative sense. Recognizing the existence of this First Amendment magnetism is important when discussing copyright law. The issue is not one of copyright versus free speech, no matter how often it is framed as greedy creators against defenders of the First Amendment.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the brief history of copyright and the First Amendment.

Copyright and the First Amendment: A Brief History

The US Constitution, which grants Congress the power to “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,” was completed September 17, 1787. It officially went into effect March 4, 1789. The first federal copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1790, was signed by President Washington on May 31, 1790. The First Amendment was adopted December 15, 1791.

For nearly 200 years, the relationship between the first amendment and copyright law received little if any attention from courts or scholars. This is not entirely surprising if you consider the fact that first amendment free speech jurisprudence as a whole has only emerged within the past hundred years. 14See Robert Post, Reconciling Theory and Doctrine in First Amendment Jurisprudence, 88 California Law Review 2353 (2000); but cf. David M. Rabban, Free Speech in its Forgotten Years, Cambridge Univ. Press 1999.

This changed in 1969 when Melville Nimmer asked Does Copyright Abridge the First Amendment Guarantees of Free Speech and Press? 15Melville Nimmer, Does Copyright Abridge the First Amendment Guarantees of Free Speech and Press?, 17 UCLA L. Rev. 1180 (1969). Two more articles, by Paul Goldstein and Lionel Sobel followed shortly afterward — with Sobel’s article presciently asking about a “gathering storm” between copyright and the first amendment. 16Paul Goldstein, Copyright and the First Amendment, 70 Columbia Law Review 283 (1970); Lionel Sobel, Copyright and the First Amendment: A Gathering Storm?, 19 Copyright Law Symposium (ASCAP) 43 (1971). Over the next several decades, the clouds slowly gathered with occasional articles on the subject. 17Robert Denicola, Copyright and Free Speech: Constitutional Limitations on the Protection of Expression, 67 California Law Review 283 (1979); L. Ray Patterson, Free Speech, Copyright, and Fair Use, 40 Vanderbilt Law Review 1 (1987); Diane Zimmerman, Information as Speech, Information as Goods: Some Thoughts on Marketplaces and the Bill of Rights, 33 William & Mary Law Review 665 (1992); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society, 106 YALE L.J. 283 (1996). With the enactment of the Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the late 90s, the storm clouds finally broke; the relationship between copyright and free speech grabbed a lot of attention from scholars. 18See, for example: Mark A. Lemley and Eugene Volokh, Freedom of Speech and Injunctions in Copyright Cases, 48 Duke L.J. 147 (1998); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Asserting Copyright’s Democratic Principles in the Global Arena, 51 Vanderbilt Law Review 217 (1998); Eugene Volokh & Brett McDonnell, Freedom of Speech and Independent Judgment Review in Copyright Cases, 107 Yale Law Journal 2431 (1998); Yochai Benkler, Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 New York Univ. Law Review 354 (1999); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Market Hierarchy and Copyright in Our System of Free Expression, 53 Vanderbilt Law Review 1879 (2000); Rebecca Tushnet, Copyright as a Model for Free Speech Law: What Copyright Has in Common with Anti-Pornography Laws, Campaign Finance Reform, and Telecommunications Regulation, 42 B.C. L. Rev. 1 (2000); Alfred C. Yen, Internet Service Provider Liability for Subscriber Copyright Infringement, Enterprise Liability, and the First Amendment, 88 GEO. L.J. 1833 (2000); Alan E. Garfield, The First Amendment As a Check on Copyright Rights, 23 Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal 587 (2001); Lawrence Lessig, Copyright’s First Amendment, 48 UCLA L. Rev. 1057 (2001); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Locating Copyright Within the First Amendment Skein, 54 Stanford Law Review 1 (2001); C. Edwin Baker, First Amendment Limits on Copyright, 55 Vand. L. Rev. 891 (2002); Erwin Chemerinsky, Balancing Copyright Protections and Freedom of Speech: Why the Copyright Extension Act Is Unconstitutional, 36 Loyola Law Review 83 (2002); Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom of Imagination: Copyright’s Constitutionality, 112 Yale Law Journal 1 (2002); Yochai Benkler, Through the Looking Glass: Alice and the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Domain, 66 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 173 (2003); Michael D. Birnhack, The Copyright Law and Free Speech Affair: Making-Up and Breaking-Up, Idea: Journal of Law & Technology 43 (2003); William W. Van Alstyne, Reconciling What the First Amendment Forbids with What the Copyright Clause Permits: A Summary Explanation and Review, 66 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 225 (2003); Eugene Volokh, Essay, Freedom of Speech and Intellectual Property: Some Thoughts After Eldred, 44 Liquormart, and Bartnicki, 40 HOUS. L. REV. 697 (2003); Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004); Thomas B. Nachbar, Intellectual Property and Constitutional Norms, 104 Columbia Law Review 272 (2004); Rebecca Tushnet, Essay, Copy this Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It, 114 YALE L.J. 535 (2004); Timothy Wu, Copyright’s Communications Policy, 103 MICH. L. REV. 278 (2004); Daniel A. Farber, Conflicting Visions and Contested Baselines: Intellectual Property and Free Speech in the “Digital Millennium”, 89 MINN. L. REV. 1318 (2005); Wendy Seltzer, Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright Safe Harbors, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (2010). Taken as a whole, the academic literature has shown an increased effort at “constitutionalizing” copyright, offering a “free speech critique” of copyright. 19A phrase used by David McGowan in Some Realism About the Free Speech Critique of Copyright, 74 Fordham Law Review 101 (2005).

But despite all this academic attention toward a conflict between copyright and free speech, courts have consistently rejected separate First Amendment defenses in copyright infringement cases. On its face, this point understandably creates confusion; it’s easy to think that copyright is thus corrosive to free speech values. That’s not the case though.

As it turns out, copyright itself incorporates many of the same speech values that the First Amendment does.

Copyright’s Free Speech Values

The Supreme Court has on several occasions described copyright as the “engine of free expression.” By providing incentives to invest in creating and disseminating works, copyright drives new expression and ideas into the public sphere, benefiting everyone. Copyright infringement, especially wholesale piracy, short-circuits these incentives, creating a chilling effect on the creation of new works. Creators also have a continuing speech interest in their works, which copyright helps protect.

Copyright and the First Amendment thus serve many of the same values, just in different ways. They coexist rather than contradict. Lon Sobel explains this coexistence by demonstrating that the two operate in different spheres of influence:

The purpose of the first amendment is to guarantee freedom of expression. As Thomas I. Emerson had indicated, freedom of expression is necessary 1) to assure individual self-fulfillment, 2) to attain the truth, 3) to secure participation by the members of society in social and political decision making, and 4) to maintain a balance between stability and change in society.

Clearly none of these reasons for free expression is violated by the Copyright Act.

Individual self-fulfillment requires that man be free to express the beliefs and opinions he has formed in the process of developing his mind. As Emerson explained, expression is in fact an integral part in the development of ideas. “Hence suppression of … expression is an affront to the dignity of man.”

However, the expression of the beliefs and opinions of another, using the exact words the other used, is not any part of the development of one’s own ideas. True, “‘A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant can see farther than the giant himself.'” But any consideration of the ideas of another which is thoughtful enough to provoke new ideas in the mind of the reader, should also be thoughtful enough to enable the reader to restate his own new ideas. Thus, the Copyright Act prohibition of word-for-word copying of another can hardly be thought of as “an affront to the dignity” of the one who would have otherwise copied. The Copyright Act is merely an impediment to the one who would reap where he has not sown.

The attainment of truth depends upon free expression because no person or group can possess all knowledge. Truth is distilled from the volatile mixture of opposing opinions. But the expression of an opinion already expressed by another — in the same words used by that other — adds nothing to the search for truth. It is merely the repetition of an opinion that was already available from its original source. Nor is it an answer to allege that the infringer may be supplying customers the copyright holder was unable to supply. It is freshman economics that supply — to the extent it is variable — will increase to meet the demand.

Since the ascertainment of truth depends upon the consideration of every relevant fact and opinion, it is important that all members of society participate in social and political decision-making. Freedom of expression is necessary in order for people to participate truthfully and fully. Moreover, since, as the Declaration of Independence states, governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” the governed must have the freedom to express their consent — or lack of it. However, what is important in this regard is the participation of one’s self in the decision-making processes. The man who has expressed and copyrighted his own views has already contributed those views. The government is not further assisted by one who merely parrots that which has already been said. Therefore, copyright laws do not impede any useful participation in the decision-making processes.

[…]

In the sum and substance, the first amendment was designed to encourage and protect the communication of diverse ideas. Copyright laws, protecting as they do only particular expressions, do not conflict with any of the first amendment’s purposes. 20Copyright and the First Amendment: A Gathering Storm?, 19 Copyright Law Symposium (ASCAP) 43, 71-74 (1971).

Copyright’s Internal Handling of Free Speech

If copyright law and the First Amendment coexist, does that mean they never contradict? Of course not. But courts’ handling of First Amendment issues in copyright cases differs from its handling of First Amendment issues in other types of cases.

To understand why, we need to first look a little closer at how courts deal with free speech arguments in general. One District Court provides a little background:

Courts often have spoken of certain categories of expression as “not within the area of constitutionally protected speech” … But such judicial statements in fact are not literally true. All modes of expression are covered by the First Amendment in the sense that the constitutionality of their “regulation must be determined by reference to First Amendment doctrine and analysis.” Regulation of different categories of expression, however, is subject to varying levels of judicial scrutiny. Thus, to say that a particular form of expression is “protected” by the First Amendment means that the constitutionality of any regulation of it must be measured by reference to the First Amendment. 21Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes, 111 F.Supp.2d 294, 326 (SDNY 2000).

In one sense, all laws or regulations impact free speech to some extent. “[E]very civil and criminal remedy imposes some conceivable burden on First Amendment protected activities,” said the Supreme Court in Arcara v. Cloud Books. 22478 US 697, 706 (1986). “One liable for a civil damages award has less money to spend on paid political announcements or to contribute to political causes, yet no one would suggest that such liability gives rise to a valid First Amendment claim. Similarly, a thief who is sent to prison might complain that his First Amendment right to speak in public places has been infringed because of the confinement, but we have explicitly rejected a prisoner’s claim to a prison environment least restrictive of his desire to speak to outsiders.”

Frederick Schauer points out an important distinction between the “coverage” and the “protection” of the First Amendment. He notes:

Like any legal rule, the First Amendment is not infinitely applicable. Though many cases involve the First Amendment, many more do not. Thus, the acts, events, behaviors, and restrictions not encompassed by the First Amendment at all, that remain wholly untouched by the First Amendment, are the ones we will describe as not being covered by the First Amendment. It is not that the speech (or anything else) is not protected by the First Amendment. Rather, it is that the entire event does not present a First Amendment issue at all, and the government’s action is consequently measured against no First Amendment standard whatsoever. The First Amendment simply does not show up.

When the First Amendment does show up, the full arsenal of First Amendment rules, principles, maxims, standards, canons, distinctions, presumptions, tools, factors, and three-part tests becomes available to determine whether the particular speech will actually wind up being protected. 23The Boundaries of the First Amendment: A Preliminary Exploration of Constitutional Salience, 117 Harvard Law Review 1765 (2004).

What sets copyright apart from other “speech” cases — obscenity, libel, “fighting words,” etc. — is that both the coverage and the protection of the First Amendment are handled internally rather than through the panoply of “rules, principles, maxims, standards,” and so on. The two major “built-in free speech safeguards” in copyright law are the idea-expression dichotomy and fair use.

Copyright protection doesn’t cover ideas, only the expression of those ideas. This distinction between ideas and expression has been called a “definitional balance” between free speech and copyright interests — a line between what is covered by the first amendment and what is not. Copyright provides an incentive to create and disseminate expression. By extension, the ideas expressed are also disseminated, benefiting the public. But protection ends where expression ends, and anyone is free to use the ideas in any given work. In a sense, the first amendment protects this “marketplace of ideas” but doesn’t extend to a “right to copy.” 24See Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 US 186, 221 (2003): “The First Amendment securely protects the freedom to make — or decline to make — one’s own speech; it bears less heavily when speakers assert the right to make other people’s speeches.” Or, as one court bluntly put it:

We do not find any denial of freedom of expression to the “tape pirate”. What he seeks is not the freedom to express himself artistically or otherwise, but the right to make exact and identical copies of sound recordings produced by others. We fail to see as any protected first amendment right a privilege to usurp the benefits of the creative and artistic talent, technical skills, and investment necessary to produce a single long-playing record of a musical performance. 25US v. Bodin, 375 F.Supp 1265).

The fair use doctrine recognizes that some uses of copyrighted expression without the permission of the copyright owner are beneficial. Prior to the infusion of First Amendment rhetoric into the copyright realm, fair use was seen as an important component in furthering copyright’s constitutional purpose:

There are situations, nevertheless, in which strict enforcement of this monopoly would inhibit the very “Progress of Science and useful Arts” that copyright is intended to promote. An obvious example is the researcher or scholar whose own work depends on the ability to refer to and to quote the work of prior scholars. Obviously, no author could create a new work if he were first required to repeat the research of every author who had gone before him.The scholar, like the ordinary user, of course could be left to bargain with each copyright owner for permission to quote from or refer to prior works. But there is a crucial difference between the scholar and the ordinary user. When the ordinary user decides that the owner’s price is too high, and forgoes use of the work, only the individual is the loser. When the scholar forgoes the use of a prior work, not only does his own work suffer, but the public is deprived of his contribution to knowledge. The scholar’s work, in other words, produces external benefits from which everyone profits. In such a case, the fair use doctrine acts as a form of subsidy — albeit at the first author’s expense — to permit the second author to make limited use of the first author’s work for the public good. 26Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios, 464 US 417, 477-78 (1984); see also Williams & Wilkins v. US, 487 F.2d 1345, 1352-53 (Ct of Claims 1973).

At the same time, fair use has come to be seen as the primary mechanism for resolving any conflicts between free speech and copyright. 27For example: Nihon Keizai Shimbum v. Comline Business Data, 166 F.3d 65 (2nd Cir. 1999); Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Inc. v. Scoreboard Posters, Inc., 600 F.2d 1184, 1188 (5th Cir. 1979); Walt Disney Productions v. Air Pirates, 581 F.2d 751, 758-59 (9th Cir. 1978). The rationale is much the same. The only difference is a shift in framing the purpose of fair use as upholding first amendment values rather than progress of the useful arts and sciences values.

Think of it this way. the idea-expression distinction sets the boundaries of what is covered by the First Amendment. The question is not whether using another’s expression is “protected” or “unprotected” but rather whether it falls within the First Amendment’s scope at all. Even then, we have long recognized that some uses of expression should be allowed, and that’s where fair use kicks in. Fair use balances the free speech interests of the public and subsequent creator against those of the original creator.

Both these doctrines adequately address first amendment concerns within copyright law. The free speech critique of copyright essentially argues that courts should address these concerns a second time in a separate analysis. But to date, courts have found no need to ask the same question twice.

References

References
↑1 For more on Belarus and the Belarus Free Theatre, see Zone of Silence; Why Belarus Free Theatre deserves a standing ovation; and Police ‘threatened to rape’ Belarus Free Theatre director after election protest.
↑2 Visit Voltaire: Voltaire Bio.
↑3 Harlan dissent, Quantity of Copies of Books v. Kansas, 378 US 205, 222-24 (1964).
↑4 Schnapper v. Foley, 667 F.2d 102 (DC Cir 1981), discusses the hypothetical situation of the government using copyright as a pretext for actual censorship. The court said, “Underlying the appellants’ First Amendment assault on the copyright obtained for ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ is their professed concern that the Government may one day attempt to use the copyright law as an instrument of censorship … We are aware that there is at least a theoretical possibility that some copyright laws may be used by some nations as instruments of censorship … We are unaware, however, of any effort on the part of the United States Government to throttle free expression through use of the copyright laws, and we are not inclined to hypothesize such an effort nor to hand down a decision invalidating an act of Congress on that hypothetical basis … We are confident that should the day come when the Government denies someone access to a work produced at its direction on the basis of a copyright, and if the doctrine of fair use and the distinction between an idea and its expression fail to vindicate adequately that person’s interests — although we have no reason to believe that they would — the courts of the United States would on the basis of facts, not hypotheses, consider afresh the First Amendment interests implicated thereby.”
↑5 Blackstone defined freedom of the press as freedom solely from prior restraints, “not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published.”
↑6 New York Times v. US, 403 US 713, White concurrence n.1 (1971).
↑7 Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 US 539, 559-60 (1985).
↑8 A term coined by Frederick Schauer in First Amendment Opportunism.
↑9 Frederick Schauer, The Boundaries of the First Amendment: A Preliminary Exploration of Constitutional Salience, 117 Harvard Law Review 1765 (2004).
↑10 David McGowan, Why the First Amendment Cannot Dictate Copyright Policy, 65 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 281 (2004).
↑11 Book Notices, 391 Yale Literary Journal 287 (April 1879).
↑12 Sid & Marty Krofft Television v. McDonald’s, 562 F.2d 1157, 1170-71 (9th Cir 1977), referring to Duchess Music Corp. v. Stern, 458 F.2d 1305, 1310-11 (9 Cir. 1972); United States v. Bodin, 375 F.Supp. 1265, 1267-68 (W.D.Okl.1974);McGraw Hill, Inc. v. Worth Publishers, Inc., 335 F.Supp. 415, 422 (S.D.N.Y.1971) and Walt Disney Productions v. Air Pirates, 345 F.Supp. 108 (N.D.Cal.1972).
↑13 Free Speech, Copyright, and Fair Use, 40 Vanderbilt Law Review 1, 36 n.110 (1987).
↑14 See Robert Post, Reconciling Theory and Doctrine in First Amendment Jurisprudence, 88 California Law Review 2353 (2000); but cf. David M. Rabban, Free Speech in its Forgotten Years, Cambridge Univ. Press 1999.
↑15 Melville Nimmer, Does Copyright Abridge the First Amendment Guarantees of Free Speech and Press?, 17 UCLA L. Rev. 1180 (1969).
↑16 Paul Goldstein, Copyright and the First Amendment, 70 Columbia Law Review 283 (1970); Lionel Sobel, Copyright and the First Amendment: A Gathering Storm?, 19 Copyright Law Symposium (ASCAP) 43 (1971).
↑17 Robert Denicola, Copyright and Free Speech: Constitutional Limitations on the Protection of Expression, 67 California Law Review 283 (1979); L. Ray Patterson, Free Speech, Copyright, and Fair Use, 40 Vanderbilt Law Review 1 (1987); Diane Zimmerman, Information as Speech, Information as Goods: Some Thoughts on Marketplaces and the Bill of Rights, 33 William & Mary Law Review 665 (1992); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society, 106 YALE L.J. 283 (1996).
↑18 See, for example: Mark A. Lemley and Eugene Volokh, Freedom of Speech and Injunctions in Copyright Cases, 48 Duke L.J. 147 (1998); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Asserting Copyright’s Democratic Principles in the Global Arena, 51 Vanderbilt Law Review 217 (1998); Eugene Volokh & Brett McDonnell, Freedom of Speech and Independent Judgment Review in Copyright Cases, 107 Yale Law Journal 2431 (1998); Yochai Benkler, Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 New York Univ. Law Review 354 (1999); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Market Hierarchy and Copyright in Our System of Free Expression, 53 Vanderbilt Law Review 1879 (2000); Rebecca Tushnet, Copyright as a Model for Free Speech Law: What Copyright Has in Common with Anti-Pornography Laws, Campaign Finance Reform, and Telecommunications Regulation, 42 B.C. L. Rev. 1 (2000); Alfred C. Yen, Internet Service Provider Liability for Subscriber Copyright Infringement, Enterprise Liability, and the First Amendment, 88 GEO. L.J. 1833 (2000); Alan E. Garfield, The First Amendment As a Check on Copyright Rights, 23 Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal 587 (2001); Lawrence Lessig, Copyright’s First Amendment, 48 UCLA L. Rev. 1057 (2001); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Locating Copyright Within the First Amendment Skein, 54 Stanford Law Review 1 (2001); C. Edwin Baker, First Amendment Limits on Copyright, 55 Vand. L. Rev. 891 (2002); Erwin Chemerinsky, Balancing Copyright Protections and Freedom of Speech: Why the Copyright Extension Act Is Unconstitutional, 36 Loyola Law Review 83 (2002); Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom of Imagination: Copyright’s Constitutionality, 112 Yale Law Journal 1 (2002); Yochai Benkler, Through the Looking Glass: Alice and the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Domain, 66 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 173 (2003); Michael D. Birnhack, The Copyright Law and Free Speech Affair: Making-Up and Breaking-Up, Idea: Journal of Law & Technology 43 (2003); William W. Van Alstyne, Reconciling What the First Amendment Forbids with What the Copyright Clause Permits: A Summary Explanation and Review, 66 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 225 (2003); Eugene Volokh, Essay, Freedom of Speech and Intellectual Property: Some Thoughts After Eldred, 44 Liquormart, and Bartnicki, 40 HOUS. L. REV. 697 (2003); Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004); Thomas B. Nachbar, Intellectual Property and Constitutional Norms, 104 Columbia Law Review 272 (2004); Rebecca Tushnet, Essay, Copy this Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It, 114 YALE L.J. 535 (2004); Timothy Wu, Copyright’s Communications Policy, 103 MICH. L. REV. 278 (2004); Daniel A. Farber, Conflicting Visions and Contested Baselines: Intellectual Property and Free Speech in the “Digital Millennium”, 89 MINN. L. REV. 1318 (2005); Wendy Seltzer, Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright Safe Harbors, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (2010).
↑19 A phrase used by David McGowan in Some Realism About the Free Speech Critique of Copyright, 74 Fordham Law Review 101 (2005).
↑20 Copyright and the First Amendment: A Gathering Storm?, 19 Copyright Law Symposium (ASCAP) 43, 71-74 (1971).
↑21 Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes, 111 F.Supp.2d 294, 326 (SDNY 2000).
↑22 478 US 697, 706 (1986).
↑23 The Boundaries of the First Amendment: A Preliminary Exploration of Constitutional Salience, 117 Harvard Law Review 1765 (2004).
↑24 See Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 US 186, 221 (2003): “The First Amendment securely protects the freedom to make — or decline to make — one’s own speech; it bears less heavily when speakers assert the right to make other people’s speeches.”
↑25 US v. Bodin, 375 F.Supp 1265).
↑26 Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios, 464 US 417, 477-78 (1984); see also Williams & Wilkins v. US, 487 F.2d 1345, 1352-53 (Ct of Claims 1973).
↑27 For example: Nihon Keizai Shimbum v. Comline Business Data, 166 F.3d 65 (2nd Cir. 1999); Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Inc. v. Scoreboard Posters, Inc., 600 F.2d 1184, 1188 (5th Cir. 1979); Walt Disney Productions v. Air Pirates, 581 F.2d 751, 758-59 (9th Cir. 1978).

EMI Records v. UPC

By , October 18, 2010.

On October 11, The Irish High Court ruled that it did not have the authority to order Irish internet service provider UPC to implement a graduated response solution – a so-called “three strikes” approach – to reduce online piracy. The four major record labels – Warner Music, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI – had sought the injunction after successfully getting Irish ISP Eircom to adopt a similar solution in a settlement agreement earlier this year.

Canadian attorney and blogger Barry Sookman has a thorough write-up on the case that I highly recommend, EMI Records v UPC – the case for legislative solutions to illegal file sharing, which includes links exploring the issue of graduated response solutions to online piracy in more detail.

Since I’m in the US, my familiarity lies with US copyright law. However, this case does highlight some issues relevant to the distinction I made previously on this site between creative and consumptive infringement. Copyright critics frequently lump their concerns with both types of infringement together to create one big copyright bogeyman. But this conflation only hinders discussion of copyright policy.

Discussion of creative infringement centers upon internally substantive aspects of copyright law – for example, how do you draw a line between acceptable transformative use of a copyright work and infringing transformative use. When you talk about consumptive infringement – verbatim, substitutive use of a work – there’s very few substantive copyright issues to consider. Instead, the discussion centers around procedural and enforcement issues.

Case in point is the opinion from this case. While the case concerns the enforcement of copyrights, it isn’t so much a copyright case as it is a separation of powers case.

Reading the case, and paying attention to the language used, you can see that the Court fully accepts the positive value of copyrighted works and the damage online piracy causes. Justice Charleton seems highly sympathetic to the record label’s struggle against “Internet piracy.” He noted that piracy is not only a “grave economic wrong against copyright holders” but that copyright is a constitutionally protected right for creators under Irish law.

In the end, however, as much as Justice Charleton wants to help the record labels, he simply can’t. To see how he reached that conclusion, 1And because I want to share my fascination with what many feel are the boring parts of law. let’s take a quick trip down remedy lane to injunction junction.

Injunctive Relief and its Limitations

An injunction is simply a “court order commanding or preventing an action.” 2Black’s Law Dictionary. The modern remedy of injunctions developed in the equity courts of medieval England. Back then, the court system was divided between two separate court systems: courts of law and courts of equity. Courts of law were rigid and formal; plaintiffs were typically limited to receiving money to compensate for damages or injuries. Courts of equity, however, were more flexible and afforded a broader array of remedies to plaintiffs. 3James B. Stoneking, Injunctions and Equitable Remedies, Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (Kermit L. Hall, ed., Oxford University Press, 2005).

The reasoning behind equitable remedies is that there are certain situations where monetary compensation is thought to be inadequate – inadequate in the sense that a money award is incommensurate with the injury. An example of such a situation is a neighbor who cuts across your lawn to get to his property. If you don’t like him doing this, and take him to court, money damages will probably be inadequate. The trespass results in only a nominal injury – a court will likely only award nominal damages, if it awards any damages at all. Even if it does, the neighbor can continue to trespass, forcing you to continue to sue. An injunction – a court order prohibiting your neighbor from further trespass – is a more adequate remedy, as it more directly addresses the result you want.

The separate courts of law and courts of equity have largely merged in common law countries, though the distinction between legal and equitable remedies remains.

As you might imagine, injunctions are a powerful remedy – and with great power comes great responsibility. Common law countries like the US and Ireland – both of which count English common law as an ancestor – generally recognize a legislature’s power to place limits on equitable remedies through statutes. In the US, Congress has limited the availability of injunctions in labor disputes and rate orders of state public utility commissions, for example. 4Congressional Limitation of the Injunctive Power, OneCLE.

Leading the Court Beyond the Threshold of the Judicial Arm

Justice Charleton appears to have been willing to grant an injunction against UPC. He states that the “evidence convinces me that there is no just or convenient solution open to the record labels other than seeking injunctive relief against the service provider.” This evidence also convinced him that the injunctive relief sought by the labels – “detection, warning, and discontinuance” – is “proportionate to the vast scale of the problem.”

However, “courts must defer” to the legislature when the legislature has set out what remedies are available in a specific cause of action. Justice Charleton examines the legislative framework of Ireland relating to copyright thoroughly: examining both the text of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 itself and construing it in light of European law, as well as comparing it to related legislation in other countries. This examination leads to his ultimate conclusion that the court is precluded from ordering the injunction sought by the record labels in this case.

Respecting, as it does, the doctrine of separation of powers and the rule of law, the Court cannot move to grant injunctive relief to the recording companies against Internet piracy, even though that relief is merited on the facts.

The Future of Graduated Response in Ireland

The decision appears to be only a setback for the music industry in Ireland. The Irish Times reports that “representatives of the music industry, internet service providers and the Government will now meet” to discuss new approaches to combating online piracy in light of the ruling.

An interesting twist in this case is that Justice Charleton was the same judge who presided over the record labels’ earlier lawsuit against Eircom. In that case, Eircom agreed to implement a graduated response procedure as part of a settlement agreement with the labels, so it is a bit unclear how the UPC decision will affect that agreement.

Charleton addresses the issue in the UPC ruling, stating that the previous judgment is both “correct” and “unaffected” by this case. However, there are suggestions that Eircom is exploring its options regarding its settlement agreement in response to this decision.

Aside from that, this decision is unlikely to have too much effect in the near future. Content industries in other countries continue to favor some sort of graduated response solution. But those efforts are largely being pursued through legislation – as has already happened in France – or through voluntary agreements with ISPs.

References

References
↑1 And because I want to share my fascination with what many feel are the boring parts of law.
↑2 Black’s Law Dictionary.
↑3 James B. Stoneking, Injunctions and Equitable Remedies, Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (Kermit L. Hall, ed., Oxford University Press, 2005).
↑4 Congressional Limitation of the Injunctive Power, OneCLE.