When Politics and Copyright Collide

It's getting on toward silly... err, Presidential campaign season, and we'll likely see more silliness. Today's comes from Politico, which reports on a controversy between the Washington Free Beacon and The University of Arkansas. Significantly, the U of Ark here holds the Clinton archives, and the Beacon has been using those archives as source material for a series of stories on Hillary Clinton.

The archives have revoked the Beacon's access to the archive, on the grounds that publications in the Beacon used audio recordings from the archives without permission. In a written statement, the Archive says:

The University, however, does not tolerate the blatant and willful disregard of its intellectual property rights and policies.

This is a tricky matter, from a policy standpoint. Libraries often maintain various controls over different collections as well as enforcing copyrights held by authors of material in the library.

However, when those rights restrictions impede conversation about a controversial public figure we start adding in questions of what's in the public interest. This is the core of the Beacon's response to the Archive - the claim that their investigative reporting serves a general public interest. Which is, we should all remember, the reason copyright was invented.