Sixty Years Later: Holden Caulfield, Fair Use, and Prior Restraint Under the Copyright Act

When J.D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, he likely had little idea that his novel would become a mainstay of high school and college literature classes, that the name and character “Holden Caulfield” would pass into the popular lexicon, or that over half a century later both Salinger and Caulfield would become the focus of what could be the next important U.S. copyright law case. But with the filing in New York of Salinger v. Colting, now on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, that could well come to pass...