Barbara Ringer

Barbara Ringer was an advocate of equity and champion of copyright.

I began researching Ringer and her work when I came across a fantastic quote: “The 1976 Copyright Act is a good 1950 copyright law.” I’d never seen something so perfectly capture the strengths of the Act, such as codifying the fair use doctrine, while acknowledging its limitations in the face of advancing technology. Never did I imagine that its author would be a trailblazing woman I’d never learned about in law school.

Ringer’s quip about her own legacy led me to continue researching her career, her EEOC complaint and lawsuit, and her scholarship, all of which I’ve written about in Ringer’s Wikipedia article. I’ve tried to situate her work, advocacy, and legacy back into the historic record. But as the founding director of a clinic dedicated to serving the public interest in intellectual property and information policy, I’m most struck by Ringer’s vision for the copyright law that will inevitably succeed her Copyright Act. Ringer proclaimed that a key goal comprising the public interest in copyright is “to provide the widest possible access to information of all kinds.” Nearly a decade after writing about Ringer for the first time, I still couldn’t agree more.

TLDR:

Amanda Levendowski, The Lost and Found Legacy of Barbara Ringer, The Atlantic (July 9, 2014)
Wikipedia, Barbara Ringer (last updated March 23, 2021)
U.S. Copyright Office + Georgetown Institute for Technology Law and Policy, Advancing Inclusion in Copyright and Register Ringer’s Legacy (Nov. 19, 2020)
Steve Andreadis, Barbara Ringer’s Legacy of Fighting for Equity at the Copyright Office: An Interview with Amanda Levendowski, U.S. Copyright Office (Nov. 19, 2021)