About the American Law Institute (ALI)
Founded over a century ago, the American Law Institute (ALI) is an independent scholarly organization that creates influential legal publications, most notably “Restatements of the Law.” These works aim to clarify and standardize core principles of state common law, serving as guidance for the judiciary and attorneys. While Restatements lack binding legal power, they often carry substantial weight in legal practice, frequently referenced by attorneys in briefs and cited by judges in their rulings, thereby wielding considerable influence over judicial decision-making across the United States.
In 2015, the ALI made the unprecedented decision to start a new project focused on “restating” federal statutory law, the Restatement of Copyright. The decision was unusual because Restatements traditionally only cover state common law principles, not established bodies of federal statutory law. The organization’s decade-long effort to produce a Copyright Restatement was completed in May 2025, but not without significant controversy. Throughout the project, participants—including representatives of the U.S. Copyright Office, renowned copyright law professors, federal judges, and many esteemed attorneys—were highly critical of the Copyright Restatement drafts that were disseminated for the participants to review each year.
In some cases, concerns were addressed, but in many cases they were not, without any explanation. Frustrations among participants reached such a level that these individuals and organizations felt forced to leave the project in the final stages, shortly before the ALI’s final approval. In total, more than one-third of the project’s participants resigned from the effort. This mass departure included prominent copyright academics, legal practitioners, and veteran ALI members, all of whom submitted resignation letters expressing their concerns about the project’s direction and misrepresentations of the law.
The Copyright Restatement Transparency Project is not affiliated with the ALI in any way.
Resignations from the Copyright Restatement project include more than one-third of the project’s participants
Resignations
- Cynthia Arato, Shapiro Arato Bach
- Shyamkrishna Balganesh, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
- Simon K. Barsky, SKB Consulting
- Dale Cendali, Kirkland & Ellis
- Jacqueline Charlesworth, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz
- Kenneth Doroshow, Recording Industry Association of America
- Michael D. Fricklas, Advance Publications Inc.
- Janet Fries, Lutzker & Lutzker
- Jane Ginsburg, Columbia Law School
- Keith Kupferschmid, Copyright Alliance
- Dean Marks
- Peter Menell, UC Berkeley Law
- David Nimmer, Irell & Manella
- Mickey Osterreicher, National Press Photographers Association
- Mary Rasenberger, Authors Guild
- Jay Rosenthal, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp
- Benjamin Sheffner, Motion Picture Association
- Joshua Simmons, Kirkland & Ellis
- Regan Smith
- Suzanne Telsey, McGraw Hill
- Marketa Trimble, UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law
- Suzanne Wilson, U.S Copyright Office (formerly)
- Nancy Wolff, Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard
Resignations from the Copyright Restatement project encompassed several prominent groups within the copyright legal community
Resignations:
The American Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Law Section (ABA-IPL) resigned from the project, submitting a letter that outlined its fundamental objections to the project’s trajectory and approach. ABA-IPL stated that its decision “to resign reflects our concerns regarding the direction and methodology of the Restatement project,” emphasizing that the completed Restatement “does not present a balanced representation of copyright law and is not aligned with the policies and principles of the ABA-IPL Section.”
A group of distinguished copyright professors withdrew from the project, including Jane Ginsburg, Shyam Balganesh, David Nimmer, and Peter Menell—all of whom had served in advisory roles throughout the decade-long effort. In their resignation letter, the scholars expressed profound concerns about both the final content of the Restatement and the approval process itself. They characterized the completed work as advancing a “revisionist agenda” that undermines judicial confidence and argued that the project had fundamentally “failed to achieve the core objectives that define what a Restatement should accomplish.”
The Intellectual Property Law Owners Association (IPO) requested the removal of both its organizational name and its designated Liaison from all materials associated with the Restatement. In its resignation letter, the IPO articulated serious reservations about the project’s legal analysis, stating that the organization “remains concerned that the project has in many places adopted minority interpretations of copyright law without clearly stating the majority rule.” The IPO warned that the final document “will be unhelpful and misleading to courts and litigants,” creating a risk that it would be inappropriately cited in legal proceedings despite failing to accurately reflect established legal precedent.
A coalition of 14 industry professionals and copyright specialists who had served in Adviser and Liaison roles throughout the project submitted a collective resignation letter detailing systemic problems with the Restatement’s development process. According to the letter, the project’s Reporters consistently “disregarded and dismissed concerns and comments” from key stakeholders, including the U.S. Copyright Office, federal judges, and numerous other contributors, when those perspectives conflicted with the Reporters’ own theoretical positions on copyright law. The signatories argued that this dismissive approach resulted in a final product that presents “an inaccurate and unbalanced view of copyright law” that strays from both the statutory framework established by the U.S. Copyright Act and established judicial interpretations. Among the signatories was Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid, who also released a separate statement highlighting these misgivings.
Simon Barsky, a lifetime member of the ALI who had served as an Adviser throughout the project, submitted a letter asking that his name be removal from the final publication unless specific conditions were met. He proposed two alternatives: either include a clear disclaimer acknowledging the document’s limitations or reclassify the work entirely as a Principles project rather than a traditional Restatement. Barsky’s letter characterized the final product as representing an “aspirational rather than accurate statement of the law,” suggesting that it advances preferred legal outcomes rather than faithfully documenting existing jurisprudence.
Professor Marketa Trimble, who participated in the project through the Members Consultative Group, formally requested the removal of her name from the final publication unless a disclaimer was added clarifying that the Restatement does not reflect unanimous agreement among all participants. In her resignation letter, Trimble expressed disappointment with the project’s development process, noting that “many crucial comments, including by the Copyright Office and project Advisers, who are preeminent experts in copyright law, have been discounted or indefensibly rejected.” Her critique highlighted the failure to adequately incorporate feedback from authoritative sources and recognized experts in the field, suggesting that legitimate scholarly input was systematically ignored when it challenged the Reporters’ preferred interpretations.
The Copyright Restatement was subject to repeated concerns voiced by copyright experts, professors, government officials, and lawmakers.
Then-Register of Copyrights Karyn Temple expressed strong opposition in a January 2018 letter to the ALI, stating that the Institute’s project “appears to create a pseudo-version of the Copyright Act” and calling for suspension of what she deemed a “misguided” initiative.
Then-Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Andrei Iancu objected to the project in a 2018 letter to the ALI, citing “fundamental concern about the process and format” of the initiative. He warned that any attempt to create alternative black letter law for the prescriptive provisions of the Copyright Act would result in “confusion and ambiguity” and risk having the federal statute’s meaning “clouded or altered.”
Numerous members of congress voiced their opposition in a 2019 letter to the ALI, raising questions and expressing grave concerns about the project. They argued that “courts should rely upon statutory text and legislative history, not [on] Restatements that attempt to replace the statutory language and legislative history established by Congress with novel interpretation.”
The American Bar Association (ABA) sent a 2019 letter to the ALI questioning the direction of the project and the Reporters’ lack of response to numerous commentators’ concerns about the substance of earlier drafts and warning that a “Restatement that focuses not on existing law but on the law as the Reporters would like to see it will be of dubious value and is inconsistent with the restatements that ALI has produced historically.”
Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter raised similar concerns in a 2021 letter to the ALI, highlighting multiple problematic aspects of the draft Restatement. She noted that “the Restatement process to date has been perceived by onlookers, including some Advisers, as inadequately documented, leading to questions being raised about the possible influence of the normative views of the Reporters.”
Many copyright industry organizations sent a letter in 2015 to the ALI warning that the Copyright Restatement was more likely to look like a restatement of the Reporters’ views on copyright rather than a restatement of actual copyright law. Specifically, the letter explained that lead Reporter Christopher Sprigman has consistently argued in favor of a limited scope of copyright and it’s believed that his motivations are to change the law to support a certain viewpoint in ongoing policy debates.
A group of prominent academics sent a letter to members of congress criticizing the Reporters’ approach to the Copyright Restatement, including a lack of methodology, departure from ALI practice by attempting to supplant a federal statute with manufactured “black letter” law, Reporter bias, a number of substantive deficiencies in the text, and that the Reporters were largely ignoring these critiques.