The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, has filed an amicus brief asking the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to affirm a lower court ruling that Iowa’s book ban law is unconstitutional. And of course it is. The subject barely warrants legal examination because it is impossible to draft a content-focused general book ban law that does not ...
In the 1980s, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), led by Tipper Gore and several other wives of Washington insiders,[1] sought to compel record labels to place stickers on albums warning consumers that the songs within contained “explicit lyrics.” Songwriters, including Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snider testified in Senate hearings to oppose the label initiative on First Amendment ...
Pride month is more than celebratory in a time when book bans are on the rise in the United States, and 26% of the titles banned “have LGBTQ+ characters or themes,” according to PEN America. With politicians like Ron DeSantis determined to make “anti-wokeness” part of the Republican brand, this neologism for hate-speech has taken the form of book and ...
Justice O’Connor, in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises (1985), called copyright “the engine of free expression.” This was not a novel idea. The Justice was merely summarizing a well-established relationship between an author’s copyrights and the freedom to express herself as she wishes. Freedom in artistic expression requires that the author have a degree of personal economic liberty, which ...
I think Senator Blumenthal summed it up about right, as he was quoted in this week in the Wall Street Journal: “I’ve certainly been one of Congress’ loudest critics of Section 230, but I have no interest in being an agent of Bill Barr’s speech police.” In the post I wrote right after Trump threw a hissy fit because Twitter ...
