Right to Write Fund to Back Creative Artists

by Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 9/10/2008 7:23:00 AM

The Right to Write Fund, which helped defend Roger Rapoport when he was sued for trying to publish the Harry Potter Lexicon, has announced that it is raising funds to help support other creative artists faced with legal threats or lawsuits. The Right to Write Fund will also establish an educational repository and serve as a clearinghouse focused on fair use and other First Amendment issues confronting authors, especially when works move between print, the Internet, film, the fine arts and new media.

Currently, the organization is part of Center for Ethics in Action, whose president, Anne B. Zill, is also the treasurer for Right to Write. Zill said she is in the process of having Right to Write receive its owns tax exempt status. “We want to bring national attention to fair use and First Amendment issues,” Zill said. Documents dealing with both issues will be housed in the Special Collections and Archives of the Grand Valley State University Libraries in Allendale and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Right to Write archive and clearinghouse will collect and disseminate legal briefs, facts and analyses as well as literary and media accounts of copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property statutes.

Among the groups supporting Right to Write are Stanford University Law School’s Fair Use Project and Harvard Law School’s Citizen Media Law Projects. “We are seeing far too many important works being scuttled because of baseless legal threats directed at creative artist by copyright holders who object to the use or criticism of their work,” said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School.

In addition to Ardia and Zill, others on the board of advisors are Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School; Martha Ferriby, director of the Hackley Public Library in Muskegon, Mich.; Arend Lubbers, former president of Grand Valley State University; RDR publisher Roger Rapoport; Dan Royer, chairman of the department of writing at Grand Valley State University; and Meredith Spear, a consultant on healthcare and a board member of Mother Jones magazine.