IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—Tenn. App.: In school shooting records request, no conflict between Public Records Act and Copyright Act, (Feb 6, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The shooter’s personal writings could be viewed by the public without copying.

Law enforcement authorities in Nashville who investigated a deadly school shooting could satisfy Tennessee public records law without violating the Copyright Act by allowing the shooter’s writings to be viewed by interested parties in private without making copies, the Tennessee Court of Appeals has held. The court’s opinion, in finding that the Copyright Act did not restrict private disclosure of the potentially copyrightable materials in this manner, was the latest in a long string of holdings by state and federal courts that have sought to reconcile state public disclosure laws with the limitations imposed by copyright law (Brewer v. Metropolitan Government Of Nashville And Davidson County, No. M2024-01139-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. App. Oct. 30, 2025)).

The opinion arises out of a 2023 school shooting in Nashville that left six victims dead. Several entities and individuals lodged requests for information from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department under the Tennessee Public Records Act. Of particular interest to the requestors were the shooter’s apparently voluminous journals and personal writings, some of which the police confiscated from her car the day of the shooting. (The shooter herself was killed by responding officers.) Several other entities and individuals, including the church that ran the school and the parents of several victims, intervened in the proceedings to oppose disclosure.

The police department found that the records could not be disclosed under state and federal law, and the Chancery Court for Davidson County agreed. The entities and individuals seeking disclosure of the records appealed, leading to this opinion.

Impact of Copyright Act. The court of appeals remanded the case to the trial court for further consideration. Much of the court’s decision turned on questions of state law—specifically, the applicability of victims’ rights laws and the applicability of two statutory exceptions to the Public Records Act (one barring disclosure of school safety measures and another barring disclosure of evidence in active criminal investigations). Generally speaking, the court of appeals ruled in favor of disclosure of the shooter’s writings on each of these issues, although it allowed that in some cases targeted redactions would be appropriate before full disclosure.

But in addition to addressing these state law issues, the court of appeals also found itself having to determine whether the federal Copyright Act prohibited disclosure of the materials. The issue arose because the parents of the shooter assigned all intellectual property in the shooter’s writings to the parents of the victims. Those parents, noting that the Copyright Act preempted any state public disclosure law, argued that the disclosure of the records would interfere with the exclusive rights that they held under the Act. Were they right? The court of appeals found that they were not.

The court set forth several reasons for its conclusion. First, the court noted, the specific writings at issue were not registered with the Copyright Office and were not in the court record. Thus, the court reasoned, there was no basis in the record for the court to determine whether all of the shooter’s writings were original works of authorship suitable for copyright protection. That distinguished this case, the court noted, from the holdings of other state courts—specifically in New Jersey, California, and Florida—that had found that copyrighted works were protected from disclosure under public records laws. “Inasmuch as the [p]arents ask us to essentially conclude that disclosure... amounts to copyright infringement,” the court observed, “it is a curious thing that neither this Court nor the [p]arents know what the material at issue contains, much less the extent to which it qualifies for copyright protection.”

Second, even if the materials were assumed to be protectable as original works of authorship, the court found, there was a more significant problem with the parent’s argument: the scope of the Copyright Act. The Act protects, among other things, a copyright holder’s exclusive rights to copy, make derivatives of, distribute, perform, and display copyrighted work. But all that the Public Records Act required, the court noted, was that records “be open for personal inspection.” Considering this statutory purpose, the court noted, it was possible to construe the law in such a way that did not require public display of the material nor reproduction of the materials. As a state court in Missouri had observed, the court noted, “one could certainly disclose a record without either reproducing or distributing the same record.” The state and federal statutes could both be satisfied by this measure.

Moreover, even though the question was not raised in this particular case, the court also addressed the question of whether a defendant in a hypothetical copyright infringement lawsuit over reproduction of the materials would be entitled to rely on the fair use defense. The precedents on the issue, the court noted, “reflect a variety of results.” Courts in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Utah, and Ohio had all determined, for example, that the fair use doctrine would permit the copying of such materials. On the other hand, the court noted, courts in Missouri and Connecticut had both found that they could not decide the issue because any application of the fair use doctrine would have to arise in a specific case in which the federal courts would have exclusive jurisdiction. (Though perhaps ironically, IP Law Daily only recently covered a case in which a federal court of appeals declined to decide the same issue, preferring to defer to the state court.) In any event, the court noted, and contrary to the parents’ position, the “weight of authority” on this issue did not rule out a fair use exception for such records.

The case is No. M2024-01139-COA-R3-CV.

Judge: Davis, J.

Attorneys: Samuel P. Funk (Sims Funk, PLC) for Clata Renee Brewer. John I. Harris III (Schulman, Leroy & Bennett, PC) for Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County.

Cases: Copyright TennesseeNews