IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—D.D.C.: No free pass to reproduce court filings just because they are on the public docket, (May 26, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The January 6 attacks on the Capitol continue to leave an unexpected fallout on copyright law.

The fact that an expert report had been publicly filed and was available for viewing and downloading on the public docket did not mean that it could be reproduced in another court filing by another party without the permission of the report’s author, the District Court for the District of Columbia has held. The court, in rejecting a copyright infringement defense brought by the attorneys for several criminal defendants involved in the 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, also reaffirmed the statute of limitations discovery rule and found that fair use and other arguments could not be definitively decided without further discovery in the case (Olson v. Law Offices Of Kira Anne West, No. 1:25-cv-03840-BAH (D.D.C. May 25, 2026)).

The opinion comes in a set of lawsuits brought by the owner of In Lux Research and Analytics, a firm that produces jury-attitude studies. After the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, several of the defendants criminally charged in those events sought—perhaps not surprisingly—to move their trials out of the District of Columbia. The lawyers for two sets of those defendants, known as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, respectively, hired the firm to produce reports documenting DC jurors’ alleged bias against the defendants. Those attorneys filed the reports publicly in an effort to get the criminal cases transferred, but to no avail.

But while that may have been the end of the road for litigation over the motions to transfer, litigation over the two reports themselves was only just beginning. In 2013, the research firm sued the attorneys representing the Proud Boys for copyright infringement and contract breach over the attorneys’ alleged failure to pay for the reports. After a trial court dismissed the claims against all but John D. Hull and his law firm, a jury rejected the claim of copyright infringement but found Hull liable for contract breach and assessed him $77,000 in damages. (The trial court, after expressing its frustration over what it termed “a case one would have expected to settle long ago,” later reduced the damages award to $30,000).

But the research firm was not yet finished with copyright litigation over the report. In 2025, the firm brought lawsuits against the lawyers for three different sets of January 6 defendants. The three lawsuits, since consolidated, accuse each set of attorneys of plucking the report from the federal court docket, through the PACER network, and repurposing it in their own motions—also unsuccessful—to transfer venue. The three attorneys moved to dismiss the complaints on multiple grounds, leading to this opinion.

Statute of limitations. The court rejected the motion to dismiss. It first addressed a statute of limitations argument brought by two of the attorneys. In each of those cases, the attorneys noted, they filed the report in support of their transfer motions in the summer of 2022, while the lawsuits against them were not brought until the end of October and the beginning of November 2025—more than three years later. Did the statute of limitations bar those lawsuits? The research firm argued that it did not, and the court—at least for now—agreed.

For one thing, the court found, as a matter of law the statute of limitations started running not when the reports were filed but rather when the research firm later discovered they had been filed. To be sure, the court noted, the District of Columbia Circuit had not yet decided whether the statute of limitations for copyright actions accrued at the time of injury or at the time of discovery. (The Supreme Court, faced with the issue in 2024, also notably left it undecided.) But every other circuit to have decided the issue—as well as many district courts in DC, the court noted—had found in favor of the discovery rule. The attorneys provided “no good reason to depart from the unanimous and overwhelming weight of persuasive authority on this issue,” the court found.

Nor would the attorneys prevail on their argument that the research firm should have discovered the claims earlier. To be sure, the court noted, the research firm was clearly aware by mid-October 2022 that at least some attorneys were using its report improperly, as that was the date that the Proud Boys’ attorney filed their (allegedly unpaid-for) version of the report on the docket in connection with their own transfer motion. But although “questions abound[ed] as to why plaintiff took years to uncover defendants’ alleged infringements, all of which were discoverable on public dockets,” the court noted, the statute of limitations defense was “not appropriate” at this stage. “When plaintiff should have commenced her search of PACER, and when those search processes should have uncovered alleged copyright infringements, are contested questions of fact that cannot be conclusively answered from the pleadings alone,” the court reasoned.

Constitutional right of access. Nor would the attorneys persuade the court by invoking an asserted “constitutional right[] of the public to access, review and distribute documents filed on PACER during a judicial proceeding.” To be sure, the court noted, such a right existed in principle—but it was also “constrained by competing considerations, such as interests in privacy.” Here, the court noted, the question was not whether the attorneys had a general right to view and reference judicial documents, but whether they “went a step too far by reproducing and distributing the work for their own profit and cost savings for their client.” Indeed, the court noted, the attorneys could have used the report in their own cases by pointing to the docket entry, citing a few key lines, or even summarizing it. But their “wholesale use” of the report in their clients’ defense, the court found, went beyond what the law allowed. “To hold otherwise,” the court reasoned, “would strip copyright protection from every photograph, book, film, song, or other creative work ever filed on the public docket in a litigation.”

Other issues. The court easily rejected several other defenses made by the attorneys. There was no question at this stage that the report itself was copyrightable, the court found, because the copyright registration certificate provided “a prima facie showing of copyrightability sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss.” The research firm’s unsuccessful effort to persuade a jury of copyright infringement in the earlier Hull case did not collaterally estop the firm’s owner from bringing the claim here, the court found, because the attorneys in that case used a different version of the report, had contracted for the right to use the report, and had also made their own contribution to that report—and thus that case involved “markedly different facts from those here.” Finally, the court found, the attorneys’ fair use defense involved “a fact-intensive inquiry” and thus was not ripe for decision on a motion to dismiss.

The Case is No. 1:25-cv-03840-BAH.

Judge: Howell, B.

Attorneys: James Henry Bartolomei, III (James H. Bartolomei, III PA) for Lindsay Olson. Jonathan Jeffress (Kaiser Dillon, PLLC) for Law Offices of Kira Anne West.

Cases: Copyright DistrictofColumbiaNews GCNNews