Copyright Absurdity: Reagan Biographer Gets Paraphrased, Demands $25 Million

Craig Shirley, the author of
two books on Ronald Reagan, has sicced his lawyer on
historian Rick
Perlstein, whose ’70s history The
Invisible Bridge was published by Simon &
Schuster this week. Shirley’s attorney is demanding that the
publisher pulp Perlstein’s book, pay $25 million in damages, and
take out ads apologizing to Shirley in The New York Times, The
Washington Post, Newsweek, The Nation, The New Republic,
Slate, and Salon.

What provoked these demands? Basically, the 810 pages of The
Invisible Bridge include some information that can also be
found in Shirley’s book
Reagan’s Revolution, and in some places
Perlstein paraphrases Shirley. Shirley thinks
this constitutes copyright infringement. If you’d like to read the
bill of particulars, Dave Weigel has
posted the attorney’s letters and Simon & Schuster’s
response at Slate, and Shirley himself has posted a

litany of alleged thefts on his website.

In the first item on the latter list, the two books do sound
alike: Describing the red-light district in Kansas City, Perlstein
echoes not just the info in Shirley’s text but Shirley’s words
“festooned” and “smut peddlers.” After that, though, we essentially
get a list of places where the two writers cited the same facts.
Facts are not copyrightable, and one pair of similar sentences does
not an infringement make. I don’t see a dollar’s worth of damages
here, let alone 25 million.

I should add that Perlstein has posted his endnotes online and
that they include dozens of citations to Shirley’s book. So it’s
not as though he’s trying to conceal where those facts were found.
Shirley is upset that the source notes do not also appear in the
physical text, but the book
tells readers exactly where to go to find the references. The
worst you can say is that there are a few spots where those notes
call Shirley’s book “The Reagan Revolution” instead of
“Reagan’s Revolution.” I believe the legal term for such an error
is “a typo.”

I have both praised
and criticized
Perlstein’s writing in the past, and I’m writing a review of
The Invisible Bridge which will both praise and
criticize it some more. Mostly praise—I think it’s a good book. But
where I do find fault with it, I’ll take issue with its arguments,
not with the fact that it incorporates information from a text the
author cites repeatedly.