Written by: Haim Ravia, Dotan Hammer
Between March 2016 and August 2020, Donald J. Trump was interviewed by renowned journalist Robert Woodward on twenty separate occasions. The recordings of these twenty interviews were later utilized in the audiobook “The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Trump”. Woodward also published a paperback edition. Trump sued for joint copyright ownership of the recordings, alleging that Trump consented to the interviews specifically “for the book, only,” and not for any other purpose. Trump’s complaint further asserted that these interviews were conducted at his “own volition and outside of his official duties”.
The court decided to dismiss the lawsuit, primarily based on the requirements for joint authorship under copyright law. The Copyright Act defines a “joint work” as one prepared by two or more authors with the “intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole”. The court determined that Trump’s complaint “does not plausibly allege that Trump and Woodward ‘fully intended to be co-authors'”. A key legal principle highlighted was that an interviewee is generally not considered an “author” who “fixes” a work into a “tangible medium of expression” for copyright purposes. Copyright law, the court emphasized, protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves.
The court also found inconsistencies in Trump’s own claims within his complaint, particularly his statements that he agreed to interviews “for the book, only,” which contradicted any assertion of joint authorship or shared intent to create a unified work. Given these factors, the court concluded that Trump failed to establish a plausible copyright interest in the works.
Click here to read the court’s decision in Trump v. Simon & Schuster, Inc.
