Tillis and Schiff Want Answers from ALI on Mass Resignations Around Latest Copyright Restatement Project

Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, respectively, sent a letter on Thursday to Director of the American Law Institute (ALI) Diane Wood asking for answers to 14 questions about the latest Copyright Restatement Project.

The letter follows mass resignations from the project last year over concerns about the final approved product. Specifically, key copyright proponents resigned over what one of those who resigned, Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid, referred to as “a general undercurrent of anti-copyright sentiment that…manifests itself through a disproportionate focus on atypical court decisions that limit the scope of copyright protection.”

There has been vocal criticism of the project from copyright circles, including the Copyright Office, for years. In 2019, members of Congress sent a letter expressing serious concerns over the project. Tillis and Representatives Ben Cline (R-VA), Martha Roby (R-AL), Theodore Deutch (R-FL) and Harley Rouda (D-CA) sent a letter to ALI at the time stating that laws created through federal statute like copyright are “ill-suited for treatment in a Restatement” and threaten to muddle the law. The U.S. Copyright Office, the American Bar Association (IP Law Section) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office raised similar concerns.

The current Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, chimed in with her own opposition in 2021, when she sent a letter to the Associate Reporters on the Restatement project informing them that she was stepping down as an adviser amid a number of concerns. Those concerns have only multiplied in the years since, particularly around the treatment of copyright protection in the context of generative AI models.

According to some sources, the resignations and the firings at the Copyright Office in 2025 of Perlmutter and the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden are rooted in a general trend of the current presidential Administration to favor AI companies’ access to copyrighted works due to national security concerns. Perlmutter was most recently reinstated but is awaiting a Supreme Court decision brought by the Trump Administration asking the Court to stay the interlocutory injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in September that restored Perlmutter to her post pending her lawsuit against Trump for her removal.

Due to the timing of the firings, which coincided with the pre-publication release of the Office’s third installment in a series of reports exploring copyright issues and AI, many have connected these firings to disagreements between the Office and Administration on changes that may be needed to ensure copyright protection in the age of AI.

The letter sent Thursday by Tillis and Schiff requested answers from Wood about why over one-third of the participants on the Restatement project resigned. Most of those who resigned were copyright law professors, practitioners, and professional associations, including the American Bar Association and the Intellectual Property Owners Association, according to the letter.

Tillis and Schiff are asking for the names of those who resigned; why they resigned; what steps he ALI has taken to address the many concerns raised over the years about the Restatement Project; what percentage of those who approved the final Restatement are knowledgeable about copyright law; how objections are handled; and more.

According to reports, Wood told ALI members at the ALI Annual Meeting that criticism and disagreement is normal for ALI projects. But Kupferschmid said in an article published last year that “[i]f having over a third of the Restatement participants resign at the end of a project were “routine” for the ALI and that the process were “intended” to work this way, then the ALI would have bigger problems that go well beyond the many inaccuracies and fraught process epitomized by this Copyright Restatement.”

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