Law Of Copyright Reinterpretation Project Steers American Law Institute Further Off Course (Forbes)
Forbes, February 27, 2018
Law Of Copyright Reinterpretation Project Steers American Law Institute Further Off Course
“In April 2015, a WLF Legal Pulse post expressed concern with a nascent American Law Institute (ALI) project, Restatement of the Law: Copyright. Three years later, the drafting process continues in the face of increasing criticism from intellectual property scholars, ALI members, and even the federal government’s chief copyright official. Some of those critiques echo and amplify the concerns we expressed initially and have repeated in our posts on ALI’s other troubled project, the liability-insurance-law Restatement. Simply put, the Institute’s ambition to put its own imprint on the law imperils its credibility….Prior to the January 2018 Council meeting, numerous commenters, including Professor Ginsburg, Acting Register Claggett, and The New York City Bar called on ALI to either walk away from the copyright Restatement or reformulate it as an aspirational ‘Principles’ project. Instead, the Council opted to keep it alive by appointing a study committee. ALI has built its reputation in the judicial and legal communities by releasing treatises that add value to an area of law. Re-wording a federal statute and offering commentary on which among many judicial interpretations of that statute’s provisions is ‘right’ doesn’t add such value.”
