I’m delighted to say that Bill Patry will be guest-blogging this coming week about his new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. I’ve known Bill for 15 years, from the time that he was copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. He has also been a Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights, a full-time professor at the Cardozo School of Law, and a practicing copyright lawyer; and now he is Senior Copyright counsel at Google Inc. (though he takes great pains to note that the book represents his personal views, and not those of his employer). He is also the author of an 8-volume, 6500-page treatise, Patry on Copyright (Thomson/West), a separate treatise on fair use (also West), a prior one-volume treatise on copyright that went through two editions (BNA Books), and many law review articles. Here’s his summary of the Moral Panics book:
The way we have come to talk about copyright is harmful to the way we think about copyright, harm that has led to bad business and bad policy decisions. As George Orwell wrote, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” In place of reasoned analysis, too often we encounter emotionally laden appeals using ancient, rhetorical devices designed to demonize opponents and to create the impression there is an existential threat to society. Unless we recognize that the debates over copyright constitute an economic debate about business models, we will never be able to make the correct business and policy decisions. The book also seeks to explain why the copyright industries have so often failed to respond to — or have even fought against — consumer demand, by using the creative destruction theories of Joseph Schumpeter and the marketing theories of Theodore Levitt.
He also has a blog about his book, in which he has debated Ben Sheffner of Copyrights & Campaigns, a former Fox studios lawyer who represented John McCain in the 2008 race; that too is much worth reading, if you’re at all interested in copyright policy.
troll_dc2 says:
For readers of the blog on commas, note how the comma changes the meaning. With it, the “by using” phrase relates to “The book also seeks to explain.” Without it, the phrase relates to “have so often failed to respond to — or have even fought against — consumer demand.”
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October 3, 2009, 10:55 amCornellian says:
The Blog of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks is much more fun.
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October 3, 2009, 12:39 pmPQuincy says:
Three cheers for a discussion of how language has corrupted the debate about copyright. I hope it includes a discussion of how the term “intellectual property” cleverly disguises the historical origins of copyright as a government-granted monopoly license justified explicitly by the public good! (Those drafters of the Constitution sure did lean in the socialist direction...good thing the courts feel free to ignore what they actually said.)
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October 3, 2009, 1:24 pmCurt Fischer says:
Maybe for you it meant that. The first time I read the sentence, though, I assumed (even though I saw the comma) that it was the copyright industries that were doing the using, not the book.
After I read your post I re-read the sentence, and I can how the comma might be construed to make the distinction you want it to, but it doesn’t seem dispositive to me.
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October 3, 2009, 3:26 pmGerald Barnett says:
It will be interesting to see how copyright moves from a progress argument under the Constitution to that of an economic argument as the way of clearing the air. Same for the premise in Berne that an author’s right is natural, rather than statutory. While casting the discussion in its economic dimension is very useful, I can’t see how that is the end of it.
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October 3, 2009, 3:48 pmOctober 6 roundup says:
[...] models [BoingBoing] Copyright expert/author Bill Patry is guestblogging at Volokh Conspiracy [intro, first post, [...]