The Authors Guild (Authors League of America, Inc. (ALA))

The Authors Guild (Authors League of America, Inc. (ALA))
31 East 32nd Street, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10016

Phone: (212) 563-5904
Fax: (212) 564-5363
Email: staff@authorsguild.org

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The Authors League of America, Inc., was founded in 1912 by a group of authors to protect the copyright, contract, free expression, and tax interests of creators of literary property. This action came in the wake of an adverse copyright decision by a U.S. District Court in 1910. It was not created solely as a litigating group, but it takes an active part to litigate authors' rights or to further any of its other stated purposes:

To promote the professional interests of creators of literary, dramatic, and dramatic-musical material and to encourage a better understanding of the profession of writing in the United States.

To procure satisfactory domestic copyright provisions and to promote international copyright relations.

To guard the constitutional right of authors and dramatists to freedom of expression.

To enlist the support of governmental authority and the general public for fair treatment for authors and dramatists in the field of taxation.

To advance these goals, the league also testifies before legislative bodies and government agencies and provides information to its members.

The Authors League and its affiliates, the Dramatists Guild and the Authors Guild, have over 14,600 members. To represent their interests in court, the guilds retain outside counsel and pay for their services out of their annual operating budgets. The league itself has a relatively small budget-less than $100,000, 85 percent of this sum from membership fees; interest and royalties account for an additional 12 percent. It is a nonprofit, nonideological membership organization.

Although created in response to litigation adverse to authors' interests, the league itself does not directly sponsor cases. Instead, it routinely files 15 to 20 amicus curiae briefs per year in appeals involving authors' rights under contracts, copyright law, state and federal tax laws, libel, privacy, and free expression "where the decisions might shape fundamental rules of law that affect authors." For example, in SONY Corporation of America v. Universal Studios (1984), the Authors League as amicus curiae urged the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court's decision that restricted home videotaping of television programming is in violation of copyright laws. Similarly, in Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982), the league argued that the school board's removal of certain books from school libraries violated the First Amendment. More recently, in Reagan v. Abourezk (1987), the league co-filed an amicus brief with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Americas Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Fund for Free Expression, Helsinki Watch, the Newspaper Guild, Pan American Center, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press urging the court to invalidate the exclusion of "prominent intellectuals and political leaders from Latin America" on ideological grounds.