This post presents the finish of a story that I first blogged about in 2018. Court cases can take a long time to reach a resolution, and I missed it when the decision came out last year. Before the resolution of Valancourt Books’ lawsuit, the US copyright office demanded a free copy of every book published in the US. It was uneven in pressing its demands; for reasons I don’t know, it came down hard on Valancourt, a small-run publisher. The requirement was especially burdensome for such publishers; it costs a bigger part of your assets to send out an unpaid copy when you print a hundred copies or do print-on-demand than when you print a hundred thousand. Regardless of the number, it was a clear-cut violation of the Fifth Amendment, which says the government can’t take private property for public use without paying “just compensation.”
In 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed with this reasoning and said the requirement for free copies was unconstitutional.
As I wrote in 2018:
Valancourt Books is a print-on-demand house run by a same-sex married couple with no other employees. It has over 400 books in print, so the government is demanding that they send over 800 volumes, paying for both printing and shipping out of their own pockets. The alternative is to pay a fine of $250 plus the book’s retail price for each book.
The Association of American Publishers celebrated this decision. Its amicus brief said that “nearly half of the books collected through the deposit system are subsequently rejected” and noted that
the mandatory deposit system — in addition to being unlawful — is “inefficient and wasteful, as the Library ends up giving away or destroying a large portion of what it receives. What is more, the Library lacks the resources to process all of the works it already has in its possession; millions of works await cataloging in long-term storage, where they are inaccessible to researchers.”
This decision put an end to an illegal policy that could have ruined Valancourt Books and hung over the heads of many other publishers.