SCOTUS Nominee Jackson Had Her 2018 AHRA Decision Upheld on Appeal

Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden's nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, is best known to consumer tech industry-watchers for her March 2018 decision in U.S. District Court in D.C. siding with Chrysler, Ford and General Motors in their defense of 2014 Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies allegations they violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (see 1602220055 and 1408010063). The U.S. Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit upheld Jackson's decision in January 2020. Jackson now sits on that court.

Senate Judiciary “will begin immediately to move forward" on Jackson’s nomination "with the careful, fair, and professional approach she and America are entitled to,” said Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill. Her “achievements are well known” to the committee, “as we approved her to the D.C. Circuit less than a year ago with bipartisan support” (see 2106070073). Democratic leaders are hoping to expedite her confirmation similarly to the chamber’s 2020 process for confirming Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which took 30 days.

In the AHRA case, AARC alleged the automakers violated the statute by shipping vehicles with infotainment systems containing CD-copying hard drives but without serial copy management system protections and by failing to pay artists and record labels the required 2% royalty on the wholesale price of the hardware. SCMS, enacted in the statute as Sony and other manufacturers were trying to launch digital audio tape (DAT) recorders to the consumer market, permitted the making of one digital copy of a CD but barred copies of that copy.

AARC contended the hard drives constituted digital audio recording devices (DARDs) within the meaning of the AHRA, making the statute as applicable to the hard drives as to the consumer DAT recorders. The automakers argued the hard drives contained navigational aids and other materials not incidental to the music stored on them, rendering the devices not applicable under the statutory definition of DARDs. AARC countered that the hard drives were built with partitions containing only music and materials incidental to the music.

Jackson agreed with the automakers that the hard drives were not DARDs "for the purpose of the AHRA" because they contained "data and information not incidental to the music recorded on them." She also rejected AARC's partitions theory, saying she had "little doubt that the issue of what Congress meant when it defined DARDs as machines" that produce digital music recordings did not envision partitions on a hard drive as fitting those definitions.

The appeals court affirmed Jackson's ruling, saying AHRA covers a digital audio recorder only if it can make a digital audio copied recording that is also a digital musical recording as that term is defined by the statute. "It is undisputed" that the hard drives don't contain only sounds, so they don't qualify as DARDs under the AHRA, it said. In rejecting AARC’s partition theory, said the opinion, "we hold that, at least where a device fixes a reproduction of a digital musical recording in a single, multi-purpose hard drive, the entire disk, and not any logical partition of that disk, is the 'material object' that must satisfy the definition of a 'digital musical recording' for the recording device to qualify under the Act."