Structural biases. They deck the office’s credibility absent oversight.

Even when the Office does hear from the public, structural biases tend to favor the perspective of rights holders. In an interview with the American Bar Association, former Register Pallante revealed her fundamental misunderstanding of our copyright system and the Office’s role within it. As she put it, “Copyright is for the author first and the nation second.”257 While it would be a mistake to attribute this constitutionally flawed view to the Office as a whole, it is suggestive of the Office’s long-recognized tendency to prioritize the interests of copyright holders over those of the public.258

In some ways, this tendency is understandable. The Office regularly interacts with copyright holders in its day-to-day operations, and rights holders and their various trade associations and industry groups are regular, repeat participants in every policy process the Office undertakes. Moreover, it is not uncommon for Office personnel to represent those same interests before and after their government service, reinforcing the ties between the Office and industry. 259 More broadly, copyright policymaking faces familiar challenges when it comes to fully accounting for the public interest. While rights holders are a concentrated, organized, and sophisticated constituency, the public interest is diffuse, largely unorganized, and poorly resourced. 260 Although recent years have seen certain technology firms serve as an effective counterbalance to the copyright industries, those firms are often, at best, an imperfect proxy for the interests of consumers.