Law Commons^™

First Amendment Interests And Copyright Accommodations, David S. Olson

David S. Olson

Copyright law exists to encourage the creation of works of authorship by granting exclusive rights. But copyright’s incentive function seems in tension with the public’s First Amendment interests to use and freely hear copyrighted speech. Conventional wisdom holds, however, that copyright law serves to encourage much more speech than it discourages, and resolves First Amendment concerns with protections internal to copyright law like the fair use defense and the idea/expression dichotomy. This Article argues that the conventional wisdom no longer holds given the unprecedented expansion of copyright’s scope and cor-responding drastic diminution of the public domain in the last three …