With a motion to dismiss, a federal court in the United States has dismissed the lawsuit of President Donald Trump against the journalist Bob Woodward, the publishers Simon & Schuster, and the media company Paramount. The case concerned the audio book The Trump Tapes, a compilation of interviews Trump gave to Woodward in his first term in office (2016-2020).
Trump claimed close to 50 million dollars in damages and argued that he owned copyrights to the contents, because they were his words. He sought a declaratory judgment saying that he was the owner of both the audio book and the original recordings.
The court held that Trump had not sufficiently demonstrated that he could be regarded as a co-author or that he had copyright claims to the work in any other way. The interviews had been recorded with his consent and their use was within the bounds of journalistic freedom. The court offered Trump the chance to amend his complaint and to submit it anew, although the court added the comment that it appeared “unlikely” that Trump “can adequately plead a plausible copyright interest”.
Woodward and the media companies had argued that granting government officials copyrights to their public statements would put the freedom of the press at risk. This might lead to censorship of public information and a restriction of access to statements made by political leaders. It is a good development for freedom of the press that the federal court takes a critical attitude towards the granting of copyright to public statements.
