Princeton v. RedState [1]

On May 14, 2010, Princeton University Archivist and Curator of Public Policy Papers, Daniel J. Linke, sent an email [2] to RedState, a right-of-center blog [3], requesting that RedState remove a copy of Elena Kagan's undergraduate thesis from their web site. Kagan, who was recently nominated by President Obama to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote her thesis, "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933," in 1981, when she was a senior in the History Department at Princeton. Linke's email explained that "[c]opies [of the thesis] provided by the Princeton University Archives are governed by U.S. Copyright Law and are for private individual use only." Linke further asserted that "[a]ny electronic distribution is prohibited." 

RedState made Kagan's thesis available for downloading as a PDF file on May 13, 2010 in the body of a blog post [4] entitled "BREAKING: We Have Elena Kagan's College Thesis" by Erik Erickson. After receiving Linke's email, RedState removed the thesis from its web site and provided the following explanation: "PULLED AT THE REQUEST OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY EXERCISING ITS COPYRIGHT RIGHTS."

Still, on May 14, 2010, the thesis was uploaded on Scribd.com [5], where it can be read in its entirety [6]. The entire thesis is also available on infidelsarecool.com [7]. Extensive excerpts from the thesis were published in Newsweek [8] on May 12, 2010. Finally, the White House announced [9] that it will make the document available to the general public, thus ending the impasse between Princeton and the online distributors of Kagan's thesis.

According to RedState [2], Princeton was trying to protect its revenue stream from hard copies of the thesis, which it sold for $57.  Yet, according to Politico [9], "the copyright in the thesis likely belongs to Kagan, not Princeton."