Category Archives: Blog

Book Talk: History, Disrupted

Posted February 7, 2023

Join journalist CLAIRE WOODCOCK and author JASON STEINHAUER for a discussion about how social media & the web have changed the past.

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The Internet has changed the past. Social media, Wikipedia, mobile networks, and the viral and visual nature of the Web have filled the public sphere with historical information and misinformation, changing what we know about our history. This is the first book to chronicle how and why it matters.

Purchase *History, Disrupted* from Better World Books.

From Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to artificial intelligence, machine learning and algorithms, history has been widely communicated and fiercely contested across the social Web as battles over the 1619 Project, the Trump presidency, Confederate monuments and history textbooks have exploded into public view. How does history intersect with today’s most pressing debates? How does history contribute to online debates about misinformation, disinformation, journalism, tribalism, activism, democracy, politics and identity?

In the midst of growing political division around the world, this information is critical to an engaged citizenry. As we collectively grapple with the effects of technology and its capacity to destabilize our societies, scholars, educators and the general public should be aware of how the Web and social media shape what we know about ourselves – and crucially, about our past.

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JASON STEINHAUER is a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in the USA. He is the founder and host of History Club on Clubhouse with more than 100,000 followers, and was the Founding Director of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University, USA, from 2017 – 2020. A public historian with over twenty years of experience in major cultural and historical institutions in the US, Steinhauer is the Founder of the History Communication Institute and the creator of the field of History Communication, which examines how history gets communicated on the World Wide Web. He has written for CNN, TIME, The Washington Post, Poynter, Inside Higher Ed, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Foreign Policy Research Institute (where he is a Senior Fellow). He has also delivered lectures overseas on behalf of the US Department of State, created a history podcast for the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and appeared on C-SPAN’s American History TV.

CLAIRE WOODCOCK is an independent journalist based in Colorado. Her work has appeared in Motherboard Vice, NPR, Literary Hub, Aspen Public Radio, Boulder Weekly and many other publications. Her current work focuses on the politics of information in libraries. Woodcock graduated with a B.A. in English Literature from the University of New York at Fredonia in 2015 and is currently an M.A. candidate in the Media & Public Engagement program at CU Boulder. Woodcock is also a Digital Ownership Fellow with NYU Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Policy and Law, researching the digital book marketplace.

BOOK TALK: History, Disrupted
March 9 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now for the virtual discussion

Trump v. Woodward, Copyright Ownership of Interviews, and Government Works

Posted February 2, 2023

Earlier this week, you might have seen news that former President Donald Trump has filed a new lawsuit, this time against journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon & Schuster. The suit alleges, among other things, that Bob Woodward and Simon & Schuster are infringing Trump’s copyright interests by copying and distributing eight hours of “raw” interviews that Trump gave to Woodward over the course of 2019 and 2020. The complaint alleges that the interviews were recorded by Woodward for purposes of his book, Rage, which was released in September 2021, on the condition that the recordings only be used for that book. In October of 2022, and without Trump’s consent, Woodward and Simon & Schuster released The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump, which contained nearly complete audio recordings of the interviews, prompting Trump’s lawsuit.

The suit is actually pretty interesting from a copyright perspective and might yield some lessons for those who work with interviews or oral histories, or who interact with papers of elected officials. We thought it was a good opportunity to talk about some of the issues that it raises that we commonly hear about from authors:

Copyright in Interviews

A important question in the suit will likely be whether Trump has any copyright ownership interest in the interviews. Ownership of copyright in interviews is not as clear cut as you might think. In a typical interview, oral history, or similar recording you’d have at least two people contributing – the interviewer (in this case, Woodward) and the interviewee (Trump). Assuming for a moment that such contributions are sufficiently original and creative–not a high bar– and knowing as we do that they are adequately fixed since they were recorded at the direction of both parties, you’d probably conclude that rights in the interviews would rest at least originally with one or both of Woodward or Trump.

Over the years a few commentators have written about the issue of rights in interviews, and two basic approaches to ownership have emerged:

A “split copyright” theory: concluding that the contribution of the interviewer and interviewee are actually two separate works, each owned independently of the other.
A “joint ownership” theory: concluding that the contribution of the interviewer and interviewee were created with “the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole” and therefore there is just one work with two copyright owners.

Surprisingly, there isn’t much clear case law on point. Probably the most helpful case is Suid v. Newsweek, a 1980 district court case that takes the “split copyright” approach. That case was brought as a federal copyright infringement claim by Lawrence Suid, who in 1978 published a 357-page book titled “Guts Glory-Great American War Movies.” The book included previously unpublished interviews that Suide conducted with figures such as Bruce Wayne, Jack Valenti, and Michael Wayne. Newsweek in 1979 published a four page article about John Wayne that included interview quotes copied from Suid’s book. Suid sued for copyright infringement. For the interviews, the court concluded that Suid did not have a valid claim because the quotes originated with the interviewee (in this case, Wayne) and not Suid himself. The court explained, “the author of a factual work may not, without an assignment of copyright, claim copyright in statements made by others and reported in the work since the author may not claim originality as to those statements.”

This “split copyright” approach is also the one apparently taken by the U.S. Copyright Office when it reviews registration applications for interviews. The Copyright Office Compendium III (Section 719) explains that:

The U.S. Copyright Office will assume that the interviewer and the interviewee own the copyright in their respective questions and responses unless (i) the work is claimed as a joint work, (ii) the applicant provides a transfer statement indicating that the interviewer or the interviewee transferred his or her rights to the copyright claimant, or (iii) the applicant indicates that the interview was created or commissioned as a work made for hire.

Though the Copyright Office guidance isn’t binding on the courts in this case–and for that matter, neither is the decision of the district court in Suid–it is the long-standing position of the Copyright Office going back to at least 1984 (see Section 317 of the Compendium II).

For the “joint copyright” approach – the logic is straightforward and favored by several commenters including prominent treatises such as Patry on Copyright and Nimmer on Copyright. John A. Neuenschwander, author of the extremely helpful A Guide to Oral History and the Law also favors this view. Because a joint work is only created when there is intent that the contributions be merged, it does raise important factual questions about what the parties were thinking when they conducted the interview.

As for Trump and Woodward, the difference between which of these two approaches might apply could matter a great deal. If the interviews are considered two separate works, and Trump actually owns rights in his portion of the interview (a big “if” – more below), he may well have a valid copyright infringement claim. If it is a joint work, however, he may not have an infringement claim but could have a claim to a share of the royalties. That’s because for a joint work, an owner of an interest in that work is allowed full use of the work, but has to account to the other joint owners for any profits resulting from that use.

Government Works

Whether Trump has any interest at all–either as a joint-owner and independently–depends on at least one other determination: whether Trump’s contributions are a “work of the United States Government.” It’s an important question for this case, but also an issue whose resolution could have important implications for authors who are using source materials that originate with U.S. Government officials, particularly elected officials.

Section 105 of the Copyright Act provides that “Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government.” And, a work of the U.S. Government is in turn defined as “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties.”

For Trump’s case, this matters because he was President at the time that he granted the interviews. So, the question is whether Trump’s contributions are a “work of the United States government” – i.e., were they prepared by “an officer or employee” of the government, and were they made “as part of that person’s official duties”?

As you might imagine, for most people receiving a paycheck from the federal government, this is a pretty straightforward question. Their employment status and job description are well defined, and it’s usually easy to identify when a work falls within or outside their official duties. For example, a lawyer for the Department of Justice who at night writes fantasy novels would be just as entitled to copyright protection for those novels as any other author would for their own novel. Similarly, when that same lawyer writes a memo for a case they are working on, it would be well within the scope of their employment.

But, the office of the President is a bit different, and as far as we’re aware, there isn’t clear guidance on whether creative works of the President in this context would be covered by Section 105. The statute isn’t widely litigated-–there are only about ten published cases ever that say anything about what it actually means–-but the Supreme Court in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org recently had the opportunity to explain that “the bar on copyright protection for federal works . . . applies to works created by all federal ‘officer[s] or employee[s],’ without regard for the nature of their position or scope of their authority.” And for its part, the Copyright Office has interpreted this to mean that “this includes works created by the President; Congress; the federal judiciary; federal departments, agencies, boards, bureaus, or commissions; or any other officer or employee of the U.S. federal government while acting within the course of his or her official duties.” One would imagine that Trump’s lawyers would push back on such a view–potentially arguing that the President is neither an “officer” or “employee” of the U.S. Government, but in a category all its own (an argument not without precedent in other contexts) or alternatively, that even if he is covered as one of those categories of individuals, his interviews were not part of his “official duties.” Whether either argument would be successful, we don’t know.

If this suit actually moves forward, it will be an interesting one to watch, especially for authors engaged in writing that relies on interviews, oral histories, or materials related to the President.

Other notes, if you care to read more

If you’re interested in the issue of copyright in interviews, there are a handful of cases addressing ownership in interviews under common law copyright (i.e., state law that was formerly applicable, but not here). A few of the most cited are Estate of Hemingway v. Random House, a NY case from 1968 in which Hemingway’s estate asserted a common law copyright claim against Random House for publication of Hemingway’s oral statements, and Falwell v. Penthouse International, a case arising under Virginia law in which Reverend Jerry Falwell sued Penthouse for publication of his oral statements. Both those cases raised issues about rights in oral statements that were never “fixed” (e.g., written down, recorded) with the authorization of the speaker. But neither is particularly helpful for this Trump-Woodward case, both because federal law applies and because it seems clear that Trump authorized the recordings.

You may also encounter an unusual case, arising under federal copyright law, titled Taggart v. WMAQ Channel 5 Chicago, a short opinion from the Southern District of Chicago from 2000. The case was brought as a pro se action by Arthur Taggart, an individual who was convicted of and incarcerated for multiple felonies. Taggart was interviewed by WMAQ, a Chicago TV station while in prison. WMAQ then broadcast portions of those interviews, which Taggart did not consent to, highlighting unfavorable facts that Taggart admitted to on tape. Taggart sued for copyright infringement, but the court dismissed his claim. The court made several highly questionable assertions about Taggart’s potential interest in the work. For example, suggesting that even though the work was recorded with Taggart’s approval, because Taggart was not directly in control of the recording device, he could not claim an interest: “if anyone was the ‘author,’ ” the court reasoned, “it may very well have been the cameraman who fixed the ideas into a tangible expression, the videotape.” The court also suggested that, despite Taggart communicating quite vividly in the interview, and WMAQ reproducing his expression verbatim, “the utterances made during an interview are not an expression of an idea for the purpose of copyright law, they are simply an idea, and thus not subject to copyright protection.” This approach to fixation and creativity have been criticized in several places (e.g., this helpful law review note by Mary Catherine Amerine) and seems to us a clear outlier.

‘Negotiating with the Dead’

Posted January 30, 2023

This is a guest post by Meera Nair, PhD, Copyright Specialist for the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), commenting on the recent extension of copyright term in Canada. It was originally published at https://fairduty.wordpress.com/2023/01/10/negotiating-with-the-dead/.

When it became evident that our copyright term was to be extended by twenty years, with no measures to mitigate the excess damage wrought by such action, Margaret Atwood’s book of this title kept returning to mind. A foray into the relationships that exist between writers and writing, a book where the word copyright did not feature among those ruminations, the title nonetheless feels apt for the days ahead.

Works of long-since-dead authors will now—in the best of situations—literally become objects of negotiation. This is purportedly to the benefit of those authors’ heirs, whereas on balance the true beneficiaries will be international publishing conglomerates and collective societies. In the worst of situations though, works will simply fade away with no surviving copy to emerge seventy years after their authors’ deaths. Those authors will be forgotten, and the public domain will remain poorer.

Atwood has been a prominent advocate for a stronger scope of protection in the name of copyright, famously remembered for her characterization of exceptions as expropriation and theft during a Standing Committee Meeting of the Department of Canadian Heritage in 1996. Two decades later, when she gave the 2016 CLC Kreisel Lecture at the University of Alberta, fair dealing was called out by name. Nonetheless, that lecture was a delight to listen to, grounded as it was on Atwood’s own experiences of being a Canadian writer.

It is her life that lies at the foundation of Negotiating, which took form through the Empson Lectures at the University of Cambridge in 2000. The combination of literature, literary criticism, book history, and history itself, written as only Margaret Atwood can, makes for compelling reading. In this book she comes perhaps closest to answering an age-old question about writing: what does it mean to write? There is no neat and tidy answer; at the very least it is blood, sweat, and tears amid negotiations between oneself, the society of the living, but also that of the dead.

To be sure, financial wherewithal is relevant to any impetus to write. Money appears approximately three times among the 74 reasons for writing taken “from the words of writers themselves (xx-xxii).” Yet, perhaps unintentionally, Atwood lays bare why copyright was not, nor ever will be, a broad determinant of success (either literary or material) for Canadian writers and publishers. From identifying the limitations of the Canadian publishing sector in the early to mid-twentieth century (to say there was disinterest in Canadian authors is putting it mildly), to stripping away the facades of originality and individuality (which underpin copyright’s structure of rights) in literary endeavor, there is much here to remind us that Canada’s phenomenal success in developing literary talent (see here and here) has occurred despite copyright, not because of it.

After borrowing the book repeatedly from the Edmonton Public Library, I had to buy it. Or rather, I had to buy it in the original form. Because what I had borrowed was a book titled On Writers and Writing, by Margaret Atwood, identified as a Canadian reprint of her earlier work, Negotiating with the Dead.

My preference was to buy Negotiating; in the peculiarities of my own mind, somehow it felt more authentic. As it turned out though, my instincts were correct. The two books are not the same. The difference lies, not in Atwood’s words, but in the representation of what copyright is. While both books specify the copyright as belonging to O.W. Toad (the name of Atwood’s enterprise), similarity ends there.

In Negotiating, published by The Press Syndicate of The University of Cambridge, readers are told: “This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exceptions and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press (emphasis mine).”

There it is. A clear indication that statutory exceptions exist and are relevant; meaning that some reproduction might not require permission. Whereas in Writers, published by Emblem (an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company), readers are told that permission is always needed for even a particle copied:

“All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law (emphasis mine).”

Despite what a publisher might prefer, Canada’s Copyright Act permits unauthorized uses of insubstantial parts of a work and unauthorized uses of substantial parts which comport with fair dealing or other exceptions. As the Supreme Court (with unanimity) stated in 2004, “the fair dealing exception is perhaps more properly understood as an integral part of the Copyright Act than simply a defence. Any act falling within the fair dealing exception will not be an infringement of copyright (para 48).” And yet, willful misinformation is standard fare among books issued in Canada.

Given the stunting of our public domain by term extension, fair dealing is even more important now as it provides some allowance of use of older, protected, material. But even a large and liberal interpretation of fair dealing, as required by our Supreme Court, is no substitute for a vibrant public domain.

With the Act expected to undergo change this year, Canada could still introduce a system of registration associated to a longer term of copyright. Owners of works which continue to be commercially successful fifty years after an author’s death, will likely choose to register and thus receive the additional twenty years of protection. Whereas works that did not have such longevity with respect to commercialization, and works that were never intended for revenue generation, would likely not be registered and thus would enter the public domain without the twenty year delay. Such a system was recommended by a former Industry Committee to uphold our obligations under CUSMA, ensure that commercial works which may benefit by a longer term are able to capture that gain, and continue to grow the public domain.

The difficulty is to convey to current Canadian lawmakers the importance of the public domain. Too often, its intangibility has meant that the public domain is perceived as being of lesser value. That an author’s work is not protected somehow deems it and the author as being unworthy. Even the way older works are spoken of, that they have “fallen into the public domain,” carries an aura of degradation familiar to the plight of “fallen women.” Whereas the public domain is precisely the opposite; it enables new works to emerge. As Jessica Litman wrote in The Public Domain (1990):

To say that every new work is in some sense based on the works that preceded it is such a truism that it has long been a cliche, invoked but not examined. … The public domain should be understood not as the realm of material undeserving of protection, but as a device that permits the rest of the system to work by leaving the raw material of authorship available for authors to use (966-968).

That this truism went unexamined and unarticulated is a testament to the difficulty of capturing the intricacy of the relationships between old works and new authors. Margaret Atwood not only undertook such an exploration but also elegantly articulated the journey that underlies every literary endeavor.

It is only fitting then that Margaret Atwood should have the last words:

… All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more – which means to enter the realm of audience, the realm of readers, the realm of change (p.178).

Authors Alliance Signs on to Amicus Brief in Gonzalez v. Google

Posted January 20, 2023

Yesterday, Authors Alliance joined a diverse group of creators of online content on an amicus brief in Gonzalez v. Google, a case before the Supreme Court. The case is about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and whether it protects curated recommendations by platforms. Section 230 protects online service providers from legal liability for content generated by users, and is considered by many to be essential for a vibrant and diverse internet. By shielding platforms from liability for speech their users make on these platforms, Section 230 enables the free flow of ideas and expression online, including speech on controversial topics. This is consistent with First Amendment values and the functioning of the internet as we know it.

The case concerns ISIS recruitment videos posted on YouTube, which the petitioner alleges were recommended by the platform. Gonzalez argues that Section 230 should not shield Google from liability, and that it aided in ISIS recruitment by recommending these videos to users. Google, on the other hand, contends that Section 230 shields it from liability for recommendations made on the platform, including the recommendations at issue in the case.

Our brief makes three principal arguments. First, it argues that Congress intended Section 230 to foster a free Internet where diverse and independent expression thrives. We explain that 230 was meant to facilitate free expression online, which is precisely what it continues to do.

Second, our brief argues that platform recommendations contribute to the flourishing of free expression, creativity, and innovation online. Authors like our members are served by platform recommendations and curation: for authors whose works may not appeal to a general audience, platform recommendations enable readers interested in a particular topic or type of work to discover them. In this way, platform recommendation can serve authors’ interests in seeing their works reach broad and diverse audiences. This is particularly important for authors just starting out in their careers who have not yet found an audience, and platform recommendations can and do help these authors grow their audiences.

Finally, we argue that altering Section 230’s protections for recommendations could have dire consequences for current and future creators—including authors— and could chill the free flow of ideas online. If platforms were to be held liable for content created by users, we believe they would be inclined to take a more conservative approach, moderating content to avoid the threat of a lawsuit or other legal action. This could reasonably lead platforms to avoid hosting content on controversial topics or content by new and emerging creators whose views are unknown. An author’s ability to write freely, including on controversial topics, is essential for a vibrant democratic discourse. And if platforms were reluctant to recommend content by new creators, who may be seen as less “safe,” dominant and established creators could be entrenched, doing a disservice to less established creators. Were platforms to censor certain writings or ideas to avoid lawsuits, the internet would become less free, less vibrant, and more sanitized—doing a disservice to all of us.

Authors Alliance thanks Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP for their invaluable support and contributions to this brief, as well as our fellow amici for sharing their stories.

Public Domain Day 2023: Welcoming Works from 1927 to the Public Domain

Posted January 5, 2023

*Montage courtesy of the* Center for the Public Domain

Literary aficionados and copyright buffs alike have something to celebrate as we welcome 2023: A new batch of literary works published in 1927 entered the public domain on January 1st, when the copyrights in those works expired. The public domain refers to the commons of creative expression that is not protected by copyright. When a work enters the public domain, anyone may do anything they want with that work, including activities that were formerly the “exclusive right” of the copyright holder like copying, sharing, translating, or adapting the work.

Some of the more recognizable books entering the public domain this year include:

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes
Agatha Christie’s The Big Four
Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep
Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York (the original 1927 publication)
Franklin W. Dixon’s (a pseudonym) The Tower Treasure (the first Hardy Boys book)

Literary works can be a part of the public domain for reasons other than the expiration of copyright—such as when a work is created by the government—but copyright expiration is the major way that literary works become a part of the public domain. Copyright owners of works first published in the United States in 1927 needed to renew that work’s copyright in order to extend the original 28-year copyright term. Initially, the renewal term also lasted for 28 years, but over time the renewal term was extended to give the copyright holder an additional 67 years of copyright protection, for a total term of 95 years. This means that works that were first published in the United States in 1927—provided they were published with a copyright notice, were properly registered, and had their copyright renewed—were protected through the end of 2022.

Once in the public domain, works can be made freely available online. Organizations that have digitized text of these books, like Internet Archive, Google Books, and HathiTrust, can now open up unrestricted access to the full text of these works. HathiTrust alone has opened up full access to more than 40,000 titles originally published in 1927. This increased access provides richer historical context for scholarly research and opportunities for students to supplement and deepen their understanding of assigned texts. And authors who care about the long-term availability of their works may also have reason to look forward to their works eventually entering the public domain: A 2013 study found that in most cases, public domain works are actually more available to readers than all but the most recently published works.

What’s more, public domain works can be adapted into new works of authorship, or “derivative works,” including by adapting printed books into audio books or by adapting classic books into interactive forms like video games. And the public domain provides opportunities to freely translate works to enrich our understanding of those works and help fill the gap in works available to readers in their native language.

Announcing the “Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use” Project

Posted December 22, 2022

We’re very pleased to announce a new project for 2023, “Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use,” which is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation. The project will focus on lowering and overcoming legal barriers for researchers who seek to exercise their fair use rights, specifically within the context of text data mining (“TDM”) research under current regulatory exemptions.

Fair use is one of the primary legal doctrines that allow researchers to copy, transform, and analyze modern creative works—almost all of which are protected by copyright—for research, educational, and scholarly purposes. Unfortunately, in practice, not everyone is able to use this powerful right. Researchers today face the challenge that fair use is often overridden by a complex web of copyright-adjacent laws. One major culprit is Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), which imposes significant liability for users of copyrighted works who circumvent technical protection measures (e.g., content scramble for DVDs), unless those users comply with a series of specific exemptions to Section 1201. These exemptions are lengthy and complex, as is the process to petition for their adoption or renewal, which recurs every three years.

Text data mining is a prime example of work that demonstrates the power of fair use, as it allows researchers to discover and share new insights about how modern language and culture reflect on important issues ranging from our understanding of science to how we think about gender, race, and national identity. Authors Alliance has worked extensively on supporting TDM work in the past, including by successfully petitioning the Copyright Office for a DMCA exemption to allow researchers to break digital locks on films and literary works distributed electronically for TDM research purposes, and this project builds on those previous efforts.

The Text Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use project has two goals in 2023:

1) To help a broader and more diverse group of researchers understand their fair use rights and their rights under the existing TDM exemption through one-on-one consultations, creating educational materials, and hosting workshops and other trainings; and

2) To collect and document examples of how researchers are using the current TDM exemption, with the aim of illustrating how the TDM exemption can be applied and highlighting its limitations so that policymakers can improve it in the future.

We’ll be working closely with TDM researchers across the United States, as well organizations such as the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and will be actively exploring opportunities to work with others. If you have an interest in this project, we would love to hear from you!

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.

Updates on the JCPA

Posted December 14, 2022

Last week saw a flurry of news about the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (“JCPA”), proposed legislation that would create an exemption to antitrust law that would allow certain news publishers to join together to collectively negotiate with digital platforms to negotiate payments for carrying their content. Authors Alliance has consistently opposed the JCPA, as we believe it would harm small publishers and creators, while further entrenching major players in the news media industry.

Last Monday, December 5th, it was uncovered that the revised JCPA had been included in a “must pass” defense spending bill (the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA), leading the legislation’s opposition to promptly decry the move and caution against it. Then, the next day, news broke that Congress had removed the JCPA from the legislation—something to celebrate for those, like Authors Alliance, who believed this was ill-advised legislation that would not have served the interests of the creators who contribute to the news media.

Background

The JCPA was first proposed as separate bills in the Senate and House of Representatives in March 2021. The JCPA has laudable goals: to preserve a strong, diverse, and independent press, responding to ongoing crises in local and national journalism. But the actual text of the JCPA doesn’t meet those goals, while causing other problems. One major problem has been that the JCPA implicitly expands the scope of copyright, and would potentially require payment for activities like linking or using brief snippets of content that are not only fair uses, but are crucial for digital scholarship. In June 2021, Authors Alliance joined a group of like-minded civil society organizations on a letter urging Congress to clarify that the bill would not expand copyright protection to article links, and that authors and other internet users would not have to pay to link to articles or for the use of headlines and other snippets that fall within fair use.

Then, this September, a new version of the bill was released in the Senate. While the revised language made some improvements—like clarifying that the bill would not modify, expand, or alter the rights guaranteed under copyright—it still failed to clarify that the bill would not cover activities like linking that are fundamental for authors creating digital scholarship. And some changes to the legislation posed serious First Amendment concerns. For example, new language in the bill would have forced platforms to carry content of digital journalism organizations that participated in the collective bargaining, regardless of extreme views or misinformation. The revised bill could also have hurt authors of news articles financially, because it failed to include a provision that would require authors of the press articles to be compensated as part of the collective bargaining it envisioned.

Inclusion in the NDAA

Last week, the news that the JCPA had been included in the NDAA was met with outcry. Its opponents argued that the bill was far too complex to be included in must-pass legislation, and merited further discussion and revision before becoming law. The JCPA was never marked up in the House of Representatives, nor did it receive a hearing there. Authors Alliance once again joined 26 other civil society organizations on a letter protesting the move and urging Congress not to include the JCPAA in military spending or other must-pass legislation.

A wide variety of other stakeholders also objected to the inclusion of the JCPA in the NDAA. Small publications, lobbyists for platforms, and even journalism trade groups reiterated their opposition. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, even threatened to remove news from their platform were the legislation to pass (in response to a similar bill being passed in Australia, Meta did in fact remove news from its platform in the country). Then, late on Tuesday, December 6th, the latest version of the bill’s text was released, with the JCPA omitted. The NDAA was approved by the House a few days later.

A Victory for Now

Because the JCPA was removed from the NDAA before its passage, it is no longer on the brink of becoming law. What happens next with the JCPA is less certain. There have already been multiple iterations of the bill, and it could be reintroduced, with or without modifications, at the next legislative session. While it’s unclear how the new makeup of Congress following the midterm elections might affect the JCPA’s chance of becoming law, this is certainly a factor in the bill’s future. This was also not the first time that the government has attempted to support journalism and local news through proposals that could affect users’ and authors’ ability to rely on fair use. Just last year, the Copyright Office conducted a study on establishing a new press publishers’ right in the United States which would have required news aggregators to pay licensing fees as part of their aggregation of headlines, ledes, and short phrases of news articles (you can read about Authors Alliance’s reply comment in that study here), activities. While the Office ultimately decided not to recommend the adoption of a new press publisher’s right, its study shows that the government may continue to investigate these policies from other fronts.

Please Support Authors Alliance This Holiday Season!

Posted December 6, 2022

Dear Members and Allies,

Since 2014, you have helped Authors Alliance fulfill our mission to advance the interests of authors who want to make the world a fairer and more just place, to spark new conversations, and to be read by wide audiences. But our continued existence is not guaranteed, and we need your help to continue to advocate for authors who write to be read. Each year, we launch a year-end fundraising campaign and this year, we need your support more than ever.

In 2022, we continued to speak out in favor of laws and policies that empower authors to reach wide audiences, with a new focus on and expansion of our advocacy work. We submitted amicus briefs in five separate federal lawsuits (our most ambitious amicus docket yet!), defending authors’ ability to exercise their fair use rights at home and abroad, create transformative derivative works, reach readers via controlled digital lending by libraries, and more. We helped authors speak out against publishers whose actions weren’t aligned with their interests, magnifying author voices in the face of a sudden loss of access to their works. We also continued to partner with allied organizations to urge Congress to reject maximalist copyright policies, weighed in on several Copyright Office rulemakings, and much more.

We’re proud of our many accomplishments in 2022, and cannot wait for you to see what we have in store for 2023. You can expect a brand new guide to legal issues related to writing about real people, a wealth of advocacy work related to strengthening authors’ ability to engage in text data mining, and more amicus briefs to represent your interests in the courts.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation today to help us carry on our work in 2023. Every contribution enables us to do our part to help you keep writing to be read!

Please support Authors Alliance today!

Author talk: The Copyright Wars with Peter Baldwin and Pamela Samuelson

Posted December 1, 2022

We are so pleased to be able to co-sponsor this next book talk with Internet Archive, hosted on December 15 at 10am PT/ 1pm ET. Join copyright scholar and Authors Alliance Board President PAMELA SAMUELSON for a discussion with historian and Authors Alliance Advisory Board member PETER BALDWIN about his book THE COPYRIGHT WARS, covering three centuries’ worth of trans-Atlantic copyright battles.

REGISTER NOW: THE COPYRIGHT WARS

Today’s copyright wars can seem unprecedented. Sparked by the digital revolution that has made copyright—and its violation—a part of everyday life, fights over intellectual property have pitted creators, Hollywood, and governments against consumers, pirates, Silicon Valley, and open-access advocates. But while the digital generation can be forgiven for thinking the dispute between, for example, the publishing industry and libraries is completely new, the copyright wars in fact stretch back three centuries—and their history is essential to understanding today’s battles. THE COPYRIGHT WARS—the first major trans-Atlantic history of copyright from its origins to today—tells this important story.

This event is co-sponsored with Internet Archive.

Analysis: Opinion Released in U.S. v. Bertelsmann

Posted November 18, 2022

Last week, the district court released its opinion in United States v. Bertelsmann, an antitrust case concerning a proposed merger between Penguin Random House (“PRH”) and Simon & Schuster (“S&S”), which the court blocked (an “amended opinion” was released earlier this week, but the two documents only differ in their concluding language). Authors Alliance has been covering this case on our blog for the past year, and we were eager to read Judge Pan’s full opinion now that redactions had been made and the opinion made public. This post gives an overview of the opinion; shares our thoughts about what Judge Pan got right, got wrong, and left out; and discusses what the case could mean for the vast majority of authors who are not represented in the discussion.

Background

The Department of Justice initiated this antitrust proceeding after PRH and S&S announced that they intended to merge, with Bertelsmann, PRH’s parent company, purchasing S&S from its parent company, Paramount Global. The trade publishing industry has long been dominated by a few large publishing houses which have merged and consolidated over time. Today, the trade industry is dominated by the “Big Five” publishers: PRH, S&S, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. And a sub-section of the trade publishing industry, “anticipated top sellers,” is the focus of the government’s argument and Judge Pan’s opinion. This market segment is defined as books for which authors receive an advance of $250,000 or higher (a book advance is an up-front payment made to authors when they publish a book, and often the only money these authors receive for their works).

The main thrust of Judge Pan’s opinion is simple: the proposed merger would have led to lower advances for authors of anticipated top sellers, and the market harm that would flow from the decreased competition in the industry is substantial enough that the merger can not go forward under U.S. antitrust law. To arrive at this conclusion, the court considered testimony from a variety of publishing industry insiders, experts in economics, and authors.

Defining the Market

Trade publishing houses are those that distribute books on a national scale and sell them in non-specialized channels, like at general interest bookstores or on Amazon. It stands in contrast to self-publishing, academic publishing, and publishing with specialized boutique presses. But changes in how we read and how books are distributed has complicated these distinctions. For example, university presses are sometimes considered to be non-trade publishers, despite the fact that many also publish trade books. University presses are particularly well poised to publish books that bridge the gap between the scholarly and the popular—Harvard University Press’s publication of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is one example, and it was an unexpected bestseller. Similarly, Amazon sells trade books alongside other types of books. The Authors Alliance Guide to Understanding Open Access is available as a print book on Amazon, but it is one we released under an open access license, and is far from a trade book. Consumers increasingly buy books online as brick and mortar bookstores across the country close or downsize, and the Amazon marketplace obscures the distinction between trade publishing and other types of publishing.

Within trade publishing, there is a small segment of books which are seen as “hot,” which the DOJ calls anticipated top sellers. While PRH argued that this distinction was pulled out of whole cloth, the popular “Publisher’s Marketplace,” a subscription-based service for those in the industry, uses certain terms (essentially code words) to indicate the size of the advance in a book deal when they are announced. “Deals under $50,000 are ‘nice,’ those up to $100,000 are ‘very nice,’ those up to $250,000 are ‘good,’ those up to $500,000 are ‘significant,’ and larger deals are ‘major.””

For the market for anticipated top sellers (trade books with advances of $250,000 or higher), the Big Five collectively control 91% of the market share. In contrast, for books where an author receives an advance under $250,000, the Big Five control just 55% of the market, with non-Big Five trade publishers publishing a significant portion of trade books in this category. Post-merger, the combined PRH and S&S were expected to have a 49% share of the market for anticipated bestsellers, according to expert testimony—more than the rest of the Big Five put together. For these reasons, the merger was determined to be improper as a matter of antitrust.

Beyond Anticipated Top Sellers

While Judge Pan’s opinion is measured, thoughtful, and reaches (from our perspective) the correct result, the broader context of the publishing industry shows how narrow the subset of authors in this market is, and how some authors were left out. The market the court considered in this case is “a submarket of the broader publishing market for all trade books.” In its pre-trial brief, PRH asserted that “[s]ome 57,000 to 64,00 books are published in the [U.S.] each year by one of more than 500 different publishing houses” and “another 10,000-20,000 are self published.” It is unclear whether the first number includes academic books and other non-trade titles. “[A]nticipated top-selling books” account for just 2% of “all books published by commercial publishers” (again, it is unclear what “commercial publishers” means in this context), and an even smaller share of all books published in the U.S. in a given year (a difficult statistic to pin down, but somewhere between 300,000 and 1,000,000 books per calendar year, depending on who you ask).

It is not just that the authors that are the topic of this discussion are unique in the high advances they receive for their books, it is that the business of publishing a book is fundamentally different for these authors than less commercially successful authors. And this is what is missing from Judge Pan’s opinion: the economic system of Big Five book acquisitions for anticipated top sellers is totally unlike many authors’ experiences getting their work published. While many authors struggle to find a publisher willing to publish their book, and more still struggle to convince their publisher to do so on terms that are acceptable to them, anticipated top sellers are generally the subject of book auctions, whereby editors bid on the rights to a manuscript in an auction held by an author’s literary agent. It is important to keep in mind that for a vast majority of working authors, these auctions do not take place.

The language in the opinion shows how it generalizes the experiences of commercially successful trade authors to authors more broadly, doing a disservice to the multitude of authors whose book deals do not look like the transactions it describes. Judge Pan states that “[a]uthors are generally represented by literary agents, who use their judgment and experience to find the best home for publishing a book.” Literary agents play an important role in the publishing ecosystem, and serve as intermediaries for some authors to help them develop their manuscripts and get the best deal possible. But the author-agent relationship is also a financial one: agents receive a “commission” of around 15% of all monies paid to the author. It stands to reason that an author who cares more about their work reaching a broad audience than receiving a large advance, or even an advance at all, is much less likely to be represented by an agent. And these authors too care about finding the right home for their work, getting a book deal with favorable terms, and feeling confident that their publisher is invested in their work. Making the publishing industry less diverse, with fewer houses overall, is just as detrimental to these authors as it is to top-selling ones.

What is troubling about the decision is not that it focuses in on a certain type of author and certain type of book—the question of what the relevant “market” is in antitrust cases is a complicated one—but that the vision of authorship and publication it presents as typical does not reflect the lived experiences of most authors. The dominant narrative that “authors” are famous people who make a living from their writing, primarily through the high advances they receive from trade publishers, simply does not bear out in today’s information economy.

Overall, the decision in this case is in many ways a boon for authors who care about a vibrant and diverse publishing ecosystem—whether they are authors of anticipated top sellers or authors who forgo compensation and publish open access. When publishing houses consolidate, fewer books are published, and fewer authors can publish with these publishers. This could lead less commercially successful trade authors to turn to other publishers (whether small trade publishers, university presses, or boutique publishers), who would then be forced to take on fewer books by less commercially successful authors. Self-publishing is an option for authors no longer able to find publishers willing to take their work on, but self-published authors earned 58% less than traditionally published authors as of 2017, and this decrease could lead some authors to abandon their writing projects altogether. These downstream effects may be speculative, but they deserve attention: this is almost certainly not the last we will hear about anticompetitive behavior in the publishing industry, and the effects of this behavior on non-top selling authors also matter. We hope that future judges considering these thorny questions will remember that authors are not a monolith, yet all are affected by drastic changes to the publishing ecosystem.