In a filing last week, lawyers for former president Donald Trump argued that Trump's $50 million copyright lawsuit against bestselling author Bob Woodward and publisher Simon & Schuster over the audiobook, The Trump Tapes: The Historical Record, should be allowed to proceed.
First filed in January, then amended on April 24, the suit accuses Woodward of improperly turning his recorded voice interviews with Trump, gathered in connection with a series of interviews that were initially recorded for Woodward’s 2021 book Rage, into an audiobook. The suit seeks a declaratory judgment acknowledging Trump's "full copyright interest" in the voice recordings. And based on some very murky math, the suit seeks "compensatory, punitive damages and disgorgement" of "at least $49,980,000."
Trump's latest filing comes in response to a motion to dismiss by Woodward and S&S, which, among its arguments, insists that because the interviews were conducted while Trump was acting in his capacity as president of the United States, Trump holds no copyright interest in them. Trump's claim "offends the basic principle codified in the Copyright Act that government officials cannot own the words they speak while carrying out official duties," lawyers for Woodward and S&S argue, adding that "President Trump’s unprecedented effort to extract private benefit from his public duties should be dismissed in its entirety."
In their June 30 reply, Trump's lawyers contend that the former president was, in fact, speaking to Woodward in his "personal" capacity when he gave the interviews. Notably, Trump attorneys cite the former president's expansive view of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) as key to their argument.
“The government works preclusion cannot be dispositive of President Trump’s rights with respect to [the interviews used for the audiobook] because these works are personal records, not presidential records, under the PRA,” Trump lawyers claim, adding that if a work is deemed a personal record, its creator, regardless of government service, can qualify for copyright protection.
In their motion to dismiss, however, lawyers for Woodward and S&S insist that there is no way the court could “plausibly infer” the interviews with Trump were conducted in a personal capacity. “Here, all of the interviews occurred when President Trump was in office and related to his conduct as president,” the motion argues. Furthermore, the Presidential Records Act actually works against Trump, codifying the principle “that presidents cannot own and profit from materials created in the course of their official duties."
In their filings, Woodward and S&S point out that a "long tradition of candid reporting depends on an axiomatic principle—reflected in copyright law—that the words a sitting president speaks while discussing his duties are not private property," adding that "no president before Donald Trump has ever claimed to own a copyright in presidential interviews or demanded royalties for their republication."
Trump is currently under federal indictment for illegally retaining classified, sensitive materials after leaving office, and for obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them. The ongoing suit, meanwhile, is the latest in a string of futile legal battles undertaken against against publishers by Trump, three of which involve S&S.
In 2020, Trump's Department of Justice sued to block former national security adviser John Bolton’s S&S-published memoir, The Room Where It Happened. The suit failed, and the book would go on to become a bestseller. After a year of litigation, the DOJ eventually dropped subsequent criminal and civil lawsuits against Bolton.
A month later, in July 2020, Trump unsuccessfully sued Simon & Schuster and his niece, author Mary Trump, in New York state court, seeking to block publication of her memoir Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. The book would go on to sell more than a million copies.
This January, Trump threatened to sue S&S and former New York criminal prosecutor Mark Pomerantz over the forthcoming publication of Pomerantz's People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account.
