Copyright Under Siege: The First Amendment Front

Authors

• Lackland H. Bloom Jr., Southern Methodist University, Dedman School of Law

Abstract

For the past twenty-five years, I have taught courses in both Copyright and Freedom of Speech. Until quite recently, these two tangentially-related subjects have co-existed in peaceful harmony. Over the years, I have traditionally devoted about ten minutes of Copyright class time to the free speech issue and no time at all in Freedom of Speech class to issues of copyright. That was then; the old world has changed. Now, we have collectively become embroiled in what some are calling the "copyright wars", with the First Amendment (specifically, freedom of speech) as one of the central battlegrounds. In 1970, two of our leading copyright scholars argued that the internal copyright doctrines adequately reconciled copyright with freedom of speech. In 1985 the Supreme Court accepted their analyses; as a result, independent first amendment analysis has not played a role in copyright cases since that time.

Recommended Citation

Lackland H. Bloom, Copyright Under Siege: The First Amendment Front, 9 Computer L. Rev. & Tech. J. 41 (2004)