Salinger v. Random House

Salinger v. Random House
Court	United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Full case name	Salinger v. Random House, Inc.
Citation(s)	811 F.2d 90 (2d Cir.1987)
Case opinions
An author has a right to protect the expressive content of his unpublished writings for the term of his copyright, and that right prevails over a claim of fair use under "ordinary circumstances"
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting	Newman and Miner, Circuit Judges
Keywords
copyright infringement, unpublished works

Salinger v. Random House, Inc., 811 F.2d 90 (2d Cir. 1987) is a United States case on the application of copyright law to unpublished works. In a case about J.D. Salinger's unpublished letters, the Second Circuit held that the right of an author to control the way in which their work was first published took priority over the right of others to publish extracts or close paraphrases of the work under "fair use". In the case of unpublished letters, the decision was seen as favoring the individual's right to privacy over the public right to information. However, in response to concerns about the implications of this case on scholarship, Congress amended the Copyright Act in 1992 to explicitly allow for fair use in copying unpublished works, adding to 17 U.S.C. 107 the line, "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."

J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) was an American author whose best-known work is The Catcher in the Rye, a novel that had taken him ten years to write and was published in 1951. A very private person, at the time the trial began he had spent the last thirty-four years living in the small community of Cornish, New Hampshire, with an unlisted telephone number and a post office box for his mail.

Ian Hamilton (1938–2001) was a respected British literary critic and biographer who decided to write a biography of Salinger. He was poetry and fiction editor of The Times Literary Supplement and had written a well-received biography of Robert Lowell, approved by the poet's family.

Hamilton asked Salinger to collaborate on the project but Salinger refused. Hamilton decided to proceed on his own. In his work, Hamilton made extensive use of letters Salinger had written to friends and others such as his neighbor, Judge Learned Hand, the novelist Ernest Hemingway, and his British publishers Hamish Hamilton and Roger Machell. The owners of these letters had donated them to the universities of Harvard, Princeton and Texas. Hamilton was able to read them after signing forms where he agreed not to publish them without consent. Hamilton said, "I regard these letters as a tremendous autobiographical source ... In my view, it would be totally inconsistent with the craft of biography to omit such materials."

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