Censorship, Copyright, and Free Speech: Some Tentative Skepticism About the Campaign to Impose First Amendment Restrictions on Copyright Law
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CENSORSHIP, COPYRIGHT, AND FREE SPEECH: SOME TENTATIVE SKEPTICISM ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN TO IMPOSE FIRST AMENDMENT RESTRICTIONS ON COPYRIGHT LAW CHRISTOPHER L. EISGRUBER* INTRODUCTION A burgeoning tide of scholarship urges courts to subject copyright law to heightened scrutiny under the Free Speech Clause. Articles of this genre commonly begin by trying to shock the reader into recognizing the repressive character of copyright law. For example: ‘‘In some parts of the world, you can go to jail for reciting a poem in public without permission from state-licensed authorities. Where is this true? One place is the United States of America [if the poem in question is protected by copyright].’’1 Another example: ‘‘Copyright gives the government authority to seize books and enjoin their sale, award damages against booksellers, or even send them to jail. If the justification were anything other than copyright, these sweeping powers would be seen as a gaping hole at the heart of free speech rights.’’2 The authors then go on to make a variety of recommendations, some more radical than others, but all variations upon the same message: copyright law has been unjustifiably exempted from First Amendment * Director, Program in Law and Public Affairs, and Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. For useful comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Phil Weiser and Tom Nachbar, and to participants in the University of Colorado’s Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program 2003 Conference on ‘‘Models of Regulation for the New Economy.’’ 1. Jed Rubenfeld, The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright’s Constitutionality, 112 YALE L.J. 1, 3 (2002). 2. 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, 4-5 (2000). 17 18 J. ON TELECOMM. & HIGH TECH. L. [Vol. 2 restrictions, and it is time for courts to examine its constitutionality more aggressively. These arguments have never found much favor with the Supreme Court.3 They once again met with a frosty reception in Eldred v. Ashcroft,4 but Eldred is unlikely to stem the tide of academic criticism. As an outsider to copyright scholarship, I want to express some skepticism about this intellectual trend. In my view, there is a good reason why courts have traditionally regarded copyright law as consistent with the Free Speech Clause. Most of Free Speech law rests on a concern about censorship: it rests, in other words, on a judgment that government ought not to prohibit the dissemination of ideas because it deems them wrong or harmful.5 For example, the government ought not suppress speech because it criticizes politicians or policies, or because it is subversive, or because it is counter-cultural, or because it deals with delicate subject-matters such as sex or religion. Copyright is not censorious in this way. Copyright does not pick and choose among ideas and subject-matters. Smutty pictures and subversive tracts get copyright protection along with reverent hymns and patriotic speeches. Of course, censorship is not the only concern of Free Speech law. The prohibition upon censorship does not, for example, fully explain the ‘‘public forum doctrine’’ or First Amendment restrictions on ‘‘time, place, and manner’’ laws. Later, we will consider these areas of First Amendment doctrine in more depth. Still, the story of copyright should at least begin with a recognition that copyright is not censorship, rather than with shocked expressions of outrage that Americans might be 3. The leading precedent is Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539 (1985). Harper & Row rejected a First Amendment challenge to copyright law; the Court emphasized that copyright is an ‘‘engine of free expression,’’ id. at 558, and that ‘‘First Amendment protections [are] already embodied in [copyright law’s] distinction between copyrightable expression and uncopyrightable facts and ideas, and the latitude . afforded by fair use . .’’ Id. at 560. 4. 537 U.S. 186 (2003). Eldred dealt with two challenges to the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act, Pub. L. No. 105-298, § 102(d)(1)(B), 112 Stat. 2827-2828 (1998) (codified as amended at 17 U.S.C. § 302 (2000)). In addition to their First Amendment challenge, petitioners contended that the Act was outside of Congress’ enumerated powers. This article does not treat the enumerated powers claim; for discussion, see Thomas Nachbar, Judicial Review and the Quest to Keep Copyright Pure, 2 J. ON TELECOMM. & HIGH TECH. L. 33 (2003). 5. See, e.g., Turner Broad. Sys. v. Fed. Communications Comm’n, 512 U.S. 622, 641 (1994) (regulations that ‘‘stifle[] speech on account of its message’’ contravene an ‘‘essential’’ First Amendment right because they attempt to ‘‘suppress unpopular ideas or information or manipulate the public debate through coercion rather than persuasion’’); Police Dep’t of Chi. v. Mosley, 408 U.S. 92, 95 (1972) (‘‘above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter or its content’’). See also LAURENCE H. TRIBE, AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 790 (2d ed. 1988) (if the Free Speech clause is ‘‘not to be trivialized, it must mean that government cannot justify restrictions on free expression by reference to the adverse consequences of allowing certain ideas or information to enter the realm of discussion and awareness’’). 2003] CENSORSHIP, COPYRIGHT, AND FREE SPEECH 19 arrested for reciting (copyrighted) poems or for disseminating (copyrighted) books. And, I shall argue, the distinction between copyright and censorship in fact takes us pretty far. Once we realize the importance of that distinction to Free Speech law, the case for imposing judicially enforced restrictions upon copyright policy becomes weak. I. CONTEXT Even if the United States had no copyright laws, you could go to jail for reciting a poem in public. Shouting Jabberwocky in a crowded theater or a courtroom will probably do the trick (you will be charged with trespass or disorderly conduct).6 In fact, you could be sanctioned for reciting an original poem of your own devising in public or in private. Suppose that you work for a company, and as part of your contract you promise to keep certain secrets that you learn on the job. Despite your promise, you decide (in exchange for a tidy sum) to share the secrets with a competitor. Your company learns of this plan and successfully seeks an injunction to keep you from talking. You decide to ignore the injunction. Because you are in a playful mood, you decide to report your secrets in the form of a poem (which you recite in public or in private; it makes no difference). You can be held in contempt of court (and perhaps prosecuted for theft as well).7 It would be possible to multiply these examples at some length. It is not, in other words, at all shocking that you can go to jail for reciting a poem. And, in fact, despite the outraged rhetoric that seems common in the new wave of copyright and First Amendment scholarship, none of the authors claim that Americans have a right to sell copies of duplicated works or to perform plays without paying royalties. Copyright’s critics all agree, in other words, that copyright laws can justify seizing books, jailing people for reciting poems, and so on --- just as most people and courts have long believed.8 So why the sudden concern about copyright’s constitutionality? The most important explanation has to do with the evolution of American copyright policy. Copyright law has become increasingly 6. Yochai Benkler worries that, in principle, copyright might restrain one from reciting Jabberwocky. Yochai Benkler, Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 354, 390-91 (1999). In practice, one is free to recite the poem because, as Benkler notes, it has passed into the public domain. Id. 7. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 1832(a)(2) (2003) (making it a crime to ‘‘communicate’’ trade secrets without authorization). 8. See, e.g., Jed Rubenfeld, supra note 1, at 48-49 (arguing that it is fully constitutional to prohibit the ‘‘pirating’’ of other people’s work); Tushnet, supra note 2, at 3 (‘‘copyright is constitutional, in large part because it . encourage[s] speech by the people it protects’’). 20 J. ON TELECOMM. & HIGH TECH. L. [Vol. 2 restrictive. Congress and the courts have extended the term of copyright protection, widened protection for ‘‘derivative works,’’ and narrowed the ‘‘fair use’’ exception.9 Many scholars have suggested that while traditional copyright laws may have left ample room for free expression, the new, more vigorous policies do not.10 These new intrusions on liberty have goaded lawyers and scholars into re-examining the relationship between copyright and free speech. At the same time, new digital technologies have expanded the opportunity for individual users to appropriate and disseminate copyrighted works. Internet users equipped with relatively cheap computers can download, edit, and distribute text, pictures, music and movies. In other words, not only is copyright law becoming more restrictive, but it is doing so when there is an increasingly wide range of expressive behavior for it to restrict.11 These developments, of course, are related. Movie studios and the music business (among others) have sought tougher copyright laws in order to prevent people from using the new technologies to copy their products.12 Still, it seems reasonable to regard new technology as an independent cause of revisionist thinking about copyright’s First Amendment status.