In a Nashville courtroom in early July, survivors of the 2023 Covenant school shooting celebrated an unusual legal victory. Citing copyright law, Judge l’Ashea Myles ruled that the assailant’s writings and other creative property could not be released to the public.
After months of hearings, the decision came down against conservative lawmakers, journalists and advocates who had sued for access to the writings, claiming officials had no right to keep them from the public. But since parents of the assailant – who killed six people at the private Christian elementary school, including three nine-year-old children – signed legal ownership of the shooter’s journals over to the families of surviving students last year, Myles said releasing the materials would violate the federal Copyright Act.
“Access to immediate information has … become a societal expectation which we all share. However, there are occasions when this immediate access to and demand for information must be balanced and moderated,” the judge wrote in the 60-page ruling.
The Nashville decision may be part of a new trend among the survivors of mass shootings and the families of those killed. In June, a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was granted copyright over the shooter’s name, thereby preventing its reproduction without permission.
The strategy, survivors say, comes first and foremost from a place of unspeakable trauma. “My family would love never to see the killer of my son in the press again,” said Tom Hoyer, whose son Luke was killed in Parkland in 2018. Controlling the distribution of a manifesto or taking a perpetrator’s name out of the headlines offers a sliver of protection from reliving the event, for which victims and their families are desperate, Hoyer explained.
But the approach is also a response to the frustration that survivors and victims’ families feel. The ways shooters have historically been portrayed in the media, they say, has been damaging; oversight over the distribution of harmful materials online – including video footage of deadly shootings – has been virtually nonexistent; and free rein over shooters’ names and intellectual property has enabled outside actors to profit from their reproduction.
Together, these elements speak to the need for greater care over how the stories of mass shootings are retold, survivors and advocates say, so that victims – rather than their killers – are remembered.
— Robin Buller in Mass shooting survivors turn to an unlikely place for justice – copyright law
That doesn’t smack of concealing agendas of the killers at all. Radical, mentally-ill, social misfit lunatics taking out their frustrations on Christian normal people. It’s just like the mainstream media covering stories unfavorable to the ruling leftists… with a pillow. Until they stop moving.
The child-killin tranz abomination was an adult. Why would the parents control it’s writings related to a heinous crime and not the citizens? This sounds like an excuse to hide information, but I’m no legal expert. Law enforcement didn’t release this information because it was “under investigation.” These writings were part of the investigation, no? Then, the citizens should have access to it.
The argument is that because the shooter died intestate (without a will), all of her property (including her copyrights in her writings) will go to her next of kin under state law, and that would be the parents.
*If* there has been an administration of the shooter’s estate, and such property has been transferred to the parents, then they are within their rights to do whatever with it, including giving it to the victim’s trust. Alternatively, as it appears that the victims intervened in the estate case (to assert their claims against it), the court could approve such a transfer as partial “payment” of the claims against the estate.
From a copyright law standpoint, the copyright owner does have the right to exclude others from reproducing / distributing, so this argument isn’t completely baseless. (It’s not a new tactic — try finding a copy of “Song of the South” now that Disney has decreed that it be buried for reasons of political correctness.)
Do you still get to hide behind copyright law when the writings are evidence in a criminal investigation? I assume law enforcement have already viewed and documented this evidence. Doesn’t the public get to see whatever they got to see short of something like a minor’s identity? The public has a legitimate interest in this just like law enforcement did. I realize I’m going off feelz here, and fully expect to be smacked down by legal theory.
[The following is not legal advice, it is commentary. If you have questions requiring legal advice, engage and consult your own attorney.]
Copyright law would not prevent the state from making copies of a work for purposes of a criminal investigation. And as the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed, Eleventh Amendment immunity means that even if the state deliberately commits copyright infringement, the copyright owner cannot recover anything from the state.
However, even where, as here, a copy of a copyrighted work has become a public record (e.g., a set of architectural plans that are filed with the city to get a building permit), state and even federal open records law don’t override the copyright act such that people can make or distribute copies of those public records. Put differently, just because a copy of a copyrighted work is a public record, that’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
What copyright law cannot do is to prevent people from *seeing* existing physical copies and reporting the facts of what is in them. (The “fair use” exception would also permit the quoting of snippets from the work, but a complete fair use analysis requires a lot more time and space than I have here.) That’s the reason for the first part of the opinion, which [mis]analyzed why there was no right of the public under state law to view the existing copies that are in the possession of the police.
If that holding is reversed (I suspect it will), then the public should be allowed to go to wherever the records are stored and view / report on them, but *not* to make copies of them. This isn’t unusual: you see this situation all the time where copies of copyrighted materials are public records. E.g., the Library of Congress (the largest library in history) has copies of an enormous quantity of works (for decades, to register a copyright in a work, you had to submit two copies: one for the copyright office, and one that went to the Library of Congress). But just as you can go to the LoC and view their deposit copy of Disney’s now-buried Song of the South, the fact that that copy is a public record doesn’t mean you have any right to make a copy of it.
Of course, if the district judge is reversed, the police could conveniently “lose” their copies of these materials, in which case there would probably be no remedy.
Thanks for the explanation! It sounds like where there’s a will there’s a way.
“…try finding a copy of “Song of the South” now that Disney has decreed that it be buried for reasons of political correctness.)”
To purchase, no, but copies still exist online and a bit-torrent search can find it as well.
https://movies2watch.tv/movie/watch-song-of-the-south-hd-9631
Download while you can…
Frankly, the media and EVERYONE else needs to stop even mentioning the names of these nut-job shooters. The fame/infamy is exactly what they want. Stop making them famous/infamous…just let them just be dead, nameless, and forgotten.