Legal Commentary

William Patry Copyright Blog Gone With the Wind

By Andis Kaulins

William Patry is closing down his copyright blog, the Patry Copyright Blog, for reasons expressed in his posting End of the Blog, which we summarize and comment below:

1. False identification of the Patry Copyright Blog with Google, plus crazies among the commenters. Patry writes:

"[When] I moved from private practice to Google I put a disclaimer to the effect that the views in the blog (as in the past) were strictly mine....

When other blogs or news stories refer to the blog, the inevitable opening sentence now is: "William Patry, Google's Senior Copyright Counsel said," or "Google's top copyright lawyer said... ." There is nothing I can do to stop this false implication that I am speaking on Google's behalf. ...

On top of this there are the crazies, whom it is impossible to reason with, who do not have a life of their own and so insist on ruining the lives of others, and preferably as many as possible. I asked myself last week after having to deal with the craziest of the crazies yet, "why subject yourself to this?" I could come up with no reason why I should: My grandfather chose to be a psychiatrist, but I chose a different professional path, one that doesn't obligate me to put up with such nonsense."

2. The Depressing State of Copyright Law

Patry writes that he is a centrist but that the depressing development of copyright law makes him appear much too negative through his dissenting postings. Patry writes:

"[I]n my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. 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...."

Of course, we understand Patry's complaints completely.

One of the reasons that we do not permit comments to LawPundit is because (based on experience) we simply do not have the time or inclination to go through postings to remove spam and improper anonymous comments. Patry has allowed comments to his blog up to now. Rather than closing down the blog, perhaps it is time to remove the comment function or seek the services of a "comment filtering" program or service.

As far as Patry's affiliation with Google is concerned, it is a fact of life that our perceived identity in the public sphere, rightly or wrongly, is very much a function of our professional affiliation(s). Patry is not alone in this. A high academic or corporate legal position grants many benefits, but it also exerts its pound of flesh. You have to be able to take the good with the bad.

That not only copyright law, but also patent and trademark law, have gone far off the rightly charted course is one of the persistent recurring themes of LawPundit. The best (and probably only) way to move patent, trademark and copyright law in the right direction again is by strong, persistent, and vocal dissent.

This can be seen in the case of Europe, where the Proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions was rejected in the year 2005 by the European Parliament, largely due to strong, persistent, vocal dissent:

"The proposal catalyzed a campaign by diverse opponents of software patents, who took the opportunity afforded by the introduction of the proposal to argue that software patents are neither economically desirable nor mandated by international law. The FFII and the EuroLinux Alliance played key roles in coordinating this lobbying campaign, which drew support from some free software and open source programmers, some academics, some small business groups, and some proprietary software developers. Many of these organisations expressed concern over what they saw as abuses of the software patent system in the USA, and argued that although some software patents might be beneficial, the net effect of the Commission's proposals would be to suppress innovation and dampen legitimate competition."

"So we beat on, boats against the current...."
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Full post as published by LawPundit on August 10, 2008 (boomark / email).