Source: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/2004/08/05/copyright-the-first-amendment/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 12:12:53+00:00

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Posted on August 5, 2004 by David L. Hudson Jr.
The Copyright Clause and the First Amendment foster creativity and freedom of expression. Ideally, these two parts of the Constitution work hand in hand to ensure greater artistic, technological and scientific advancement. But oftentimes, particularly in the age of the Internet, copyright and the First Amendment collide.
The First Amendment, the first 45 words of the Bill of Rights, provides that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” The question becomes how to balance these two legal areas.
Some inherent degree of tension exists between the First Amendment and copyright. Copyright allows creators of expressive conduct to control the flow of certain information and expression, while the First Amendment ensures the free flow of information and expression.
Copyright creates property rights for the creators of certain works. This is why copyright, along with patent and trademark law, is labeled under the rubric of intellectual property. If a person copies another’s work without permission, that person has trespassed on the creator’s property, or copyrighted expression. This is called copyright infringement. If a person directly copies another’s expression, that person has committed direct copyright infringement. If a person or company enables others to commit copyright infringement, they have committed contributory or vicarious infringement.
The theory is that if people could freely copy anyone else’s work without paying for it, there would be no incentive for the creation of new material. Why take your time to create a product if you will receive no reward?
However, the law also recognizes that if copyright law is too rigid, then there will be a dramatic reduction in the public’s access to information. Copyright law attempts to resolve this dilemma to a degree by distinguishing between expression and ideas.
Copyright law does not protect the ideas, facts, methods of operation or scientific principles contained in the author’s expression. These are considered part of the public domain. Otherwise, society could never build on prior work.
Copyright law cannot limit the dissemination of facts and ideas, but it can limit copying of an author’s particular expressive way of explaining facts and ideas. This so-called “idea/expression dichotomy” leads to a situation where ideas and facts remain in the public domain, while creators’ particular expressions of those ideas are protected by copyright.
But copyright also provides other protection for free-speech interests besides the idea/expression distinction. Copyright also provides for some built-in protection for First Amendment interests through what is called the fair-use privilege.
Fair use became an important part of the common, or judge-made, law. The Copyright Act of 1976 incorporated, or codified, the common-law concept of fair use. Section 107 of the 1976 copyright law begins with a preamble: “The fair use of a copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” For example, a book reviewer could quote portions of a book in writing her review without committing copyright infringement. The book reviewer’s quotations would qualify as fair use.
The proportion of material that was copied.
The effect of the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The first factor requires a court to determine the purpose of the new work. If a new work has a commercial purpose, that generally leans against a finding of fair use. However, just because a work has a commercial purpose does not mean that the work is not protected by fair use. Parodies are a good example. Many parodies have been accorded a fair-use privilege even though they were created for commercial profit.
Finally, the courts will ask whether the new work has harmed the commercial value of the copyrighted expression. If the new work has harmed the market for the older work, a court will be less likely to find fair use.
The Supreme Court most directly confronted the balance between copyright and the First Amendment in discussing fair use in Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises.
The Supreme Court examined the fair-use defense in this case. Shortly after leaving the White House, former President Gerald R. Ford contracted with publisher Harper & Row in 1977 to publish his unwritten memoirs.
Two years later, Harper & Row contracted with Time magazine for “first serial rights” or the exclusive right to print prepublication excerpts from the copyright holders. However, that year the Nation magazine acquired a copy of former President Gerald R. Ford’s unpublished manuscript, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford.
Using the manuscript, the Nation published a short piece titled “The Ford Memoirs — Behind the Nixon Pardon.” The article quoted 300 words from the memoirs. The Nation published its article before Time had published anything. As a result of the article, Time canceled its contract with Harper & Row.
Harper & Row then sued Nation Enterprises for copyright infringement. TheNation argued that its use qualified as “fair use” under the Copyright Act of 1976. The magazine also contended that its copying of portions of the memoirs was essential to its news reporting about the upcoming book.
A federal trial judge agreed with Harper & Row and awarded them damages. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed this ruling in a 2-1 vote, finding that the Nation’s use of quotations from the memoirs was protected by the fair-use privilege. Harper & Row then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Perhaps no form of expression provides a greater test case for the vitality of the fair-use doctrine than the parody. Parodies present difficult copyright cases because a parody by its nature copies material from a previous work.
In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court examined the bawdy rap group 2 Live Crew parody of Roy Orbison’s famous “Oh, Pretty Woman” song with its new version by the same title.
In 1964 Roy Orbison and William Dees wrote the famous rock ballad “Oh, Pretty Woman.” Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. registered a copyright for the song. Twenty-five years later, the leader of 2 Live Crew, Luther Campbell, wrote a parody that contained vulgar language and satirized Orbison’s original song.
Acuff-Rose sued Campbell and his record company for copyright infringement. The publishing company contended that Campbell had not made fair use of Orbison’s song. They pointed out that Campbell’s version used the original work for commercial purposes and that he had taken too much of the original work.
More recently, a federal court of appeals determined that Alice Randall’s parody of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind — The Wind Done Gone — qualified as a transformative work entitled to fair-use protection. Randall critiqued Mitchell’s view of the Old South by examining life through the eyes of her character Cynara — the daughter of Scarlett O’Hara’s father and Mammy.
The 11th Circuit explained its earlier order in its Oct. 10 opinion in SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Company. 11 The 11th Circuit determined that Houghton Mifflin, at least at this early stage of the litigation, had adequately shown that Randall’s book was protected as fair use.
The appeals court also determined that SunTrust Bank had failed to show evidence that Randall’s book would harm the market value of Gone With the Wind’s derivative works or take away market demand for Mitchell’s book.
Even though 2 Live Crew and Alice Randall (at the preliminary injunction stage) prevailed in the federal courts, both cases required extensive litigation. Courts will decide the application of the fair-use doctrine on a case-by-case basis. The concept of fair use is flexible and hard to define. “Although the courts have considered and ruled upon the fair use doctrine over and over again, no real definition of the concept has ever emerged,” 12 the 11th Circuit opinion said.
The Internet allows every person the ability to become a self-publisher. The cost of copying has come way down as technology has improved. “As each generation has delivered a technology better than the last, the ability of the copyright holder to protect her intellectual property has been weakened,” 17 as Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig has written.
Many involved in intellectual-property issues, particularly owners of content, feared (and still fear) that the Internet would lead to widespread copying. They pushed Congress to enact legislation that would restore greater control to copyright owners.
The result was a 1995 white paper, “Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure.” The paper pushed for government support of so-called “copyright management” systems — or software that would allow copyright owners the power to control access and copying of their work.
This push eventually led to the adoption of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. This federal law makes it a crime to write and sell devices or software to circumvent a copyright-management system. The law provides that “no person shall … offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, device, component, or part thereof” that is “primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing” a copy-protection system.
Several cases show how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and new technology collide with the First Amendment.
Motion picture studios distribute their copyrighted movies for home use on digital versatile discs (DVDs). DVDs contain copies of the motion pictures in digital form. The studios protect these motion pictures from copying with a technology-protection (encryption) system called Content Scrambling System (CSS).
The motion picture companies licensed DVD manufacturers to build CSS software into their DVD players. DVD players with a CSS license unscramble, or decrypt, the material on DVDs and play them back for the viewer. Theoretically, a DVD player without the proper license and CSS technology could not play DVD movies.
A computer hacker, a 15-year-old Norwegian named Jon Johansen, developed a program that decrypts or circumvents CSS, called DeCSS. DeCSS enables people to play DVDs on their players and computers even if their players lack the licensed decryption technology.
Several Web sites posted DeCSS software to allow people to download it. This software enables users to break the CSS system and make and distribute digital copies of DVD movies.
The Motion Picture Association of America demanded that Internet service providers remove DeCSS from their servers.
Eight movie studios sued several of these Web site operators, claiming that their posting of DeCSS software violated provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They sued Shawn Riemerdes, who owned a Web site with the domain name “dvd-copy.com,” Roman Kazan, who worked for “krackdown.com” and Eric Corley, publisher of the online magazine 2600: the Hacker Quarterly. All of the defendants distributed DeCSS software via the Internet.
The defendants argued that the DeCSS software program is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. They argue that limiting the posting of protected speech violates their and the public’s First Amendment rights.
The defendants also argued that there was a significant purpose for creating DeCSS other than to copy DVDs encrypted with CSS. According to the defendants, DeCSS was written in order to develop a DVD player that would operate under the Linux operating system as opposed to Windows.
The federal district court said that even if Johansen created DeCSS to make a DVD that would operate on the Linux operating system, the defendants still violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The court explained that offering the DeCSS program was prohibited conduct under the anti-trafficking provision of the DMCA.
The judge concluded that there was no fair-use defense to the anti-trafficking provision of the DMCA.
The court also rejected the defendants’ First Amendment arguments, including the assertion that prohibiting the posting of computer code was a direct suppression of speech. The defendants also argued that issuing a court order to stop the posting of speech (DeCSS) would amount to an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech.
The court reasoned that the DMCA’s anti-trafficking provision furthers an important governmental interest — “the protection of copyrighted works stored on digital media from the vastly expanded risk of piracy in this electronic age.”27 The federal court also determined that the protection of copyrighted works in the digital media was unrelated to the suppression of expression.
DeCSS is truthful speech on a matter of public importance that cannot be suppressed unless the government meets the highest constitutional standard of strict scrutiny.
The lower court’s injunction against the posting of speech (DeCSS) qualifies as a prior restraint on speech.
The injunction is overbroad because it bans all publication and even linking to DeCSS.
A few years ago, a college freshman named Shawn Fanning developed a technology that allowed Internet users to trade MP3 music files with other music fans over the Internet. Napster allowed individuals to locate and share these MP3 files across the Net through its MusicShare software.
Many record companies sued Napster, alleging that the company facilitated widespread piracy of its copyrightable material. The record companies asked a federal judge to issue an injunction prohibiting Napster from operating until the lawsuit was resolved. The district judge sided with the record companies.
On appeal, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in A&M Records v. Napster, Inc. 29 Napster argued that it did not commit contributory infringement because its users were not liable for direct copyright infringement. In copyright law, there can be no contributory infringement without direct infringement by another.
Napster argued that many of its consumers were fair users because they were merely space-shifting (when a customer copies songs she already owns onto a more portable media) and sampling (testing the music to decide whether to purchase it).
Napster argued that the Supreme Court decision of Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios supported its arguments. 30 In that decision, the high court ruled that the entertainment industry could not prohibit videocassette recorders (VCRs) because VCRs were used for significant non-infringing uses.
While many agree that Napster facilitated copyright violations by many music fans, they believe that the federal court rulings have shown too little consideration for peer-to-peer file-sharing technology.
For example, the American Physicians and Surgeons Inc. filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Napster before the 9th Circuit. The group argued that the district judge’s ruling would have “a profound chilling effect on the dissemination of important therapeutic medical information over the Internet.” They pointed out that the government could cite the Napster case in order to shut down any central indexing system that somehow facilitates unlawful activity.
Copyright and the First Amendment theoretically coexist to further freedom of expression and creative energies. In reality, the two operate in tension. The law attempts to reconcile this tension with the idea/expression dichotomy and the fair-use doctrine. These concepts serve to protect parodies such as Alice Randall’s recent work. The litigation over Randall’s book, however, shows the pitfalls facing those who rely on copyrighted expression.
The entertainment industry has waged war against those who have developed technologies that can lead to copyright violations. To some, the industry has also waged war against technology itself and free information. 37 Many copyright experts see copyright as a balance between copyright owners and the public. Many believe that the Congress tilted the balance too far in the direction of copyright holders when it passed the DMCA.
The challenge in the 21st century will be to balance content creators’ and content owners’ rights without stifling the development of new technology and legitimate public access to information.
Hopefully, copyright can serve as “an engine of free expression,” rather than a limit on the First Amendment.
1. Stephen Fraser, The Conflict Between the First Amendment and Copyright Laws and its Impact on the Internet, 16 Cardozo Arts & Ent. LJ 1, 9 (1998).
2. Julie Cohen, 1998 Symposium: Constitutional Issues Involving Use of the Internet: Intellectual Privacy and Censorship of the Internet, 8 Seton Hall Const. L.J. 693, 693 (1998).
3. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985).
4. Fraser, supra n. 1, at 14.
5. Emerson v. Davies, 8 F.Cas. 615, 619 (No. 4,436) (CCD Mass. 1845).
6. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 579 (1994).
10. Interview with Bruce Rogow, 10/12/01.
11. SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001 U.S. App. LEXIS 21690 (11th Cir.)(Oct. 10, 2001).
13. Jessica Litman, Reforming Information Law in Copyright’s Image, 22 Dayton L. Rev. 587, 612 (1997).
14. Fraser, supra n. 1, at 15-16.
15. Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes, 82 F.Supp. 2d 211, 220 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).
17. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999) at 124.
18. Jason Sheets, Copyright Misued: The Impact of the DMCA, 23 Hastings Comm/Ent L.J. 1, 19 (2000).
19. Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright (New York: Prometheus Books, 2001), at 174.
20. Comments of Keith Kupferschmid of Software Information Agency in symposium, Beyond Napster: Debating the Future of Copyright on the Internet, Panel Three: New Business Models, Regulatory Options and the Future of Copyright on the Internet, 50 Am. U.L. Rev. 425, 428 (2000).
23. Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Riemerdes , 111 F.Supp. 2d 294, 322 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).
28. See the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Appellate Reply Brief in Universal v. Reimerdes.
29. 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001).
30. 464 U.S. 417 (1984).
31. 239 F.3d at 1021.
32. Blaine Kimrey, Amateur Guitar Player’s Lament II: A Critique of A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. and a Clarion Call for Copyright Harmony in Cyberspace, 20 Review of Litigation 309, 327 (2001).
33. Expert Report of Professor Lawrence Lessig in the Napster case.
34. Comments of Napster attorney David Boies in John Heilemann, David Boies: The Wired Interview 258 (October 2000).
35. Litman, Digital Copyright, at 169.
37. See Bruce R. Poquette, Current Public Policy Law and Policy Issues: Information Wants to be Free, 22 Hamline J. Pub. L & Pol’y 175 (2000).

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