Politicization of Copyright | AM26

For years, the copyright landscape was seen as a largely apolitical and technocratic terrain, with the relevant axis for division not being liberal versus conservative, but rather “copyright” versus “copyleft,” terms which did not neatly correlate with party affiliation. In recent years, the traditional axes of debate have been somewhat reconfigured, with copyright increasingly entangled in broader ideological and partisan conflicts. This panel will examine how these conflicts have manifested—including through the Trump Administration’s engagement with copyright in the context of AI policy and its interest in the institutional positioning of the Copyright Office and Library of Congress—and ask whether this signals a more enduring shift. It will also explore the degree to which this is a uniquely American phenomenon, or whether battles over the DSM Copyright Directive and the AI Act in Europe tell a similar story.