Trump v. Simon & Schuster — S.D.N.Y. Dismisses Trump’s Copyright Claim Over The Trump Tapes Interviews

Background

In 2022, Simon & Schuster published The Trump Tapes, an audiobook compiling Bob Woodward’s recorded interviews of Donald Trump conducted during Trump’s first presidential term. Woodward had used those interviews as source material for his books Rage and Fear. Trump consented to the recordings at the time, but objected when Woodward and the publisher released the recordings themselves as a stand-alone audio product.

Trump sued for $50 million, claiming copyright in his own answers as the interviewee. The complaint asserted joint-authorship, breach of contract, and various state-law theories. Defendants moved to dismiss.

The Court’s Holding

The court dismissed the complaint. It held that an interview is “an inseparable unitary whole” rather than a divisible work to which interviewer and interviewee can each claim a piece of copyright authorship. Joint-authorship status under 17 U.S.C. § 101 requires that the parties intended at the time of creation to merge their contributions into a single unitary work and that each made an independently copyrightable contribution. The court found neither element established: Woodward and Trump did not share an intent to co-author a copyrighted work, and Trump’s spoken answers, however newsworthy, are not separately copyrightable contributions.

The court further held that Trump did not satisfy the fixation requirement. Copyright vests in the author who fixes the work in a tangible medium — here, Woodward, who pressed record. Trump’s consent to being recorded did not vest authorship in him. Without authorship and fixation, no copyright claim could go forward, and the state-law claims were preempted by the Copyright Act.

Key Takeaways

• Interview subjects do not have copyright in their own spoken answers when the journalist is the one fixing the recording. The recorder is the author of the recording.
• Joint-authorship under U.S. copyright law continues to require shared intent at the moment of creation. After-the-fact disputes about distribution rights do not retroactively manufacture joint-authorship.
• State-law claims attempting to backstop a copyright theory — misappropriation, unjust enrichment, conversion — are likely to be preempted in this posture.
• Public figures who sit for recorded interviews should think about contractual restrictions in advance if they want to limit downstream uses of the recordings. Copyright law will not provide that backstop after the fact.

Why It Matters

This decision is a clean application of basic copyright doctrine to a high-profile dispute. It reinforces the journalist-as-author rule for recorded interviews and gives publishers clear authority to release standalone audio products of source interviews without separate clearance from the interviewee, absent contractual restrictions.

For political figures, celebrities, and other repeat interview subjects, the practical lesson is to negotiate in advance: if a public figure wants control over how an interview can be packaged and resold, the time to address it is in a written agreement before the interview, not in a post-publication copyright suit. The court here was unmoved by the political prominence of the parties or the size of the damages demand; it applied the § 101 test that has been settled since at least Childress v. Taylor.