The closing of The Patry Copyright Blog

William Patry, who has been a full-time copyright lawyer for 26 years, is Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel. For a long time before he held that position he had a personal blog, The Patry Copyright Blog.

His personal blog was “devoted to the geekery of copyright; meaning a blog where people who loved copyright could come and discuss copyright issues in a non-partisan way.” Friday he decided to end the blog. He put forward two reasons. The first:

The Inability or Refusal to Accept the Blog for What it is: A Personal Blog [...]

There is nothing I can do to stop this false implication that I am speaking on Google’s behalf. And that’s just those who do so because they are lazy. Others, for partisan purposes, insist on on misdescribing the blog as a Google blog, or in one case involving a think tank, darkly indicating also a la Senator Joe McCarthy, that in addition to funding from Google, there may be other sources of funding too.

That’s unfortunate. But the second reason, which he assures us is independent of the first, is even sadder:

The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing [...]

Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

Via Randy Picker, “For those of us who follow copyright, this is a major loss; I feel less informed already.” Picker doesn’t agree with much of the passage quoted above:

…but I do agree that copyright law faces real challenges. For most of its recent history, copyright law has regulated professionals, not amateurs. Amateurs lacked the means to create and copy at any level of real scale, but professionals could do so. Copyright controlled that, but note that that control wasn’t self-executing. That is, the control didn’t just happen. Instead, copyright created causes of action and then lawsuits for infringement. That is an expensive system to run, but one that can be tolerated when the number of violations is relatively small. Mass democratization of copying technology means that amateurs pose real risks to professionals. Not just perfectly legit we-can-author-and-distribute-too risks, but pure copying risks. An enforcement technology that isn’t self-executing doesn’t work, hence the mixed attempts with digital rights management technology.

Patry concludes with a promise “to spend my free time figuring out a constructive way to talk about the difficult issues we face and how to advance toward their solution.”

I’ll be interested to follow that discussion.