William Patry

Of course I’m not really the audience for this entry into the ever-growing category of books on copyright for the general-interest reader; this one has some nice bits, though, including a riff on copying as a central element of creativity—Patry focuses mostly on copying as training before the development of one’s individual style, but he notices that individual styles still retain a bunch of copying, necessarily. I liked his take on why we should restore formalities (notice and registration/renewal to keep a copyright over a longer term): “The theocracy of formality-free copyright belongs to the Romantic ideal of artists starving in their Parisian garret. Copyright doesn’t want to be free any more than information does.” He defends fair use and “unauthorized creativity,” pointing out that copyright owners don’t like criticism or competition and are perfectly willing to use law to suppress both, but that doesn’t mean we should let them do it.… (plus d'informations)

Patry, who begins this short book on copyright’s overextension of control with the mildly ironic request not to preface any discussion of the book with the fact that he’s now Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, doesn’t have much to say on the subject that you couldn’t get more punchily from Larry Lessig and the like. He focuses his discussion on the use and misuse of metaphors, specifically piracy and property, in expansionist copyright rhetoric, but I was most amused by his discussion of the metaphor of work-as-child: Daniel Defoe claimed, for example, that an author’s work is “as much his own, as his Wife and Children are his own.” Patry makes two points in response: (1) no author creates in a vacuum, and (2) copyright law has never actually worked that way. By contrast, I’d think the most obvious responses include (1) actually, you do not own your wife or your children, at least (Inspector Clouseau voice) not any more, and (2) if you claimed the rights to do to your children what copyright owners do to their works (including to sell, chop up, and destroy them), we would send you to jail. Someday I want to write a paper on this metaphor, and, though today is not that day, Patry does have a good point about the rhetorical differences between “orphan” works—poor works faultlessly separated from their owners and in need of protection from exploitation—and “abandoned” works—which also need to be taken care of, but differently.… (plus d'informations)