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Breyer, J., dissenting
Copyright Clause and a First Amendment, and that the two are related.
The Copyright Clause and the First Amendment seek related objectives—the creation and dissemination of information. When working in tandem, these provisions mutually reinforce each other, the first serving as an "engine of free expression," Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U. S. 539, 558 (1985), the second assuring that government throws up no obstacle to its dissemination. At the same time, a particular statute that exceeds proper Copyright Clause bounds may set Clause and Amendment at cross-purposes, thereby depriving the public of the speech-related benefits that the Founders, through both, have promised.
Consequently, I would review plausible claims that a copyright statute seriously, and unjustifiably, restricts the dissemination of speech somewhat more carefully than reference to this Court's traditional Copyright Clause jurisprudence might suggest, cf. ante, at 204-205, and n. 10. There is no need in this case to characterize that review as a search for " 'congruence and proportionality,' " ante, at 218, or as some other variation of what this Court has called "intermediate scrutiny," e. g., San Francisco Arts & Athletics, Inc. v. United States Olympic Comm., 483 U. S. 522, 536-537 (1987) (applying intermediate scrutiny to a variant of normal trademark protection). Cf. Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U. S. 377, 402-403 (2000) (Breyer, J., concurring) (test of proportionality between burdens and benefits "where a law significantly implicates competing constitutionally protected interests"). Rather, it is necessary only to recognize that this statute involves not pure economic regulation, but regulation of expression, and what may count as rational where economic regulation is at issue is not necessarily rational where we focus on expression—in a Nation constitutionally dedicated to the free dissemination of speech, information, learning, and culture. In this sense
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