The Burden of Proof
- Jer Thorp
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Every three years, a strange bureaucratic ritual plays out in the U.S. Copyright Office.
Organizations, law school clinics, trade associations, academics, companies, and individuals file mountains of documents to request (or oppose) limited exemptions to 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1), a prohibition on circumventing the digital locks that control access to copyrighted works. The requests are mundane and quietly extraordinary. Permission to break a digital lock in order to repair your tractor. Permission to show a short clip of a film in a media studies class. Permission to access data captured by a medical device implanted in your own body. Every three years, the same arguments, the same opposition, the same mountain of paper.
What would it be like to read all of it?
Working with Michael Weinberg at the NYU Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, I set out to map that mountain. We processed the entire public record (more than 55,000 pages of documents filed across nine triennial rounds, from 2000 to 2024) using NLP pipelines to extract named entities and trace how the shape of the argument has shifted over a quarter century.
The result is Burden of Proof: a visualization that arranges every filing as a branch on a bilateral axis, proponents above, opponents below, colored by exemption class, organized chronologically from left to right across nine rounds. It doesn't try to simplify this strange bureaucratic process. It tries to show you its full weight — the labor, the repetition, the exhausting persistence of it.
The burden of proof must be met every three years with new evidence.
I'm also offering the visualization as an archival-quality poster print in three sizes. The large-format version (60×30") is the one I'd recommend if you want to actually read the branches. All prints ship rolled in a protective tube, plastic-free, worldwide.
