SJW Legal Scholars, Funded by Google, Seek to Eviscerate Copyright Protections Through 'Restatement' of Law
By Jennifer Van Laar | Jan 17, 2022 9:30 PM ET

(Stefan Rousseau/PA via AP)
We know that the progressive left engages in Astroturfing. What many are just realizing or admitting is that what you see on the surface when an issue suddenly becomes hot is just that, surface. There are years of effort behind what you see, and it’s not just in organization. Astroturfing even consists of creating the scientific and legal “research” pointing to the desired conclusion. We know that the oil and tobacco industries did this decades ago, but the practice wasn’t limited to that time and those industries. More recently, we’ve seen this happen with regard to gun control (Everytown and Bloomberg-funded “research), criminal justice (Soros-affiliated groups and think tanks fund research that is then used by District Attorney candidates to claim the “science” backs their “reimagining” efforts), and, of course, Critical Race Theory.

Now a massive astroturfing effort is happening in the field of copyright law, and anyone who produces creative content should be paying close attention. As I wrote last week, there are major problems with the American Law Institute’s Restatement project, starting with how the project was initiated (at the request of a Google-funded, anti-copyright law activist professor) and the Lead Reporter’s unacknowledged conflicts of interest. Major flaws in the draft Restatement have been pointed out by other prominent copyright law scholars, a bipartisan group from Congress, the Register of Copyrights (the director of the Copyright Office), and even Advisors to the project. All of these groups essentially claim that the Restatement incorrectly interprets the Copyright Act and the policy preferences of the Reporters are improperly included. A letter to ALI from 10 of the project’s advisors states:

The Draft has a variety of problems including inaccurately summarizing the text of the Copyright Act, confusing explanations of important principles and misleading illustrations. Moreover, as further detailed below, these problems uniformly reflect an unduly restrictive view of copyright law that is not consistent with the robust statutory rights granted by Congress to authors.

Is the problem that the Restatement draft is flawed, or is it that “progressive” forces and their capitalist enablers, such as Google and Spotify, are using the Restatement to create a new legal “gold standard” that their attorneys can use in court to get favorable rulings and set new precedent in the arena – effectively changing the law through judicial activism and not through the legislative branch?