Customer Reviews

How to Fix Copyright

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The world is always more or less divided between two kind of people. In the case of the current "copyright war", the world is divided between those that want to derogate Copyright and those that want to derogate Internet. Mr Patry belongs to neither group and so he should be listened with attention: he wants to reform the copyright system as it exists. His opinions are backed up with facts and he states clearly what are the principal changes that our system needs.

Mr. Patry argues that copyright laws have been subverted by entrenched interests. To fight this he offers a simple solution: any proposed changes to these laws must be backed by empirical evidence. You want to extend the term of protection because you claim that by doing so more works will be created? Prove it. You want to fight peer to peer networks because they cost jobs? How many? Where is the evidence?

For Mr. Patry a copyright system for the XXI century is one that helps authors get paid and allows the consumers to copy, adapt and remix the work. In that way, both the author and the public will be benefited by the law. In order to achieve this, Mr. Patry proposes shorter term of protection, more formalities in order to claim protection and a complete renovation -and extension- of the legitimate uses of protected works.

The author is not always fair with traditional gatekeepers like publishing houses, studios, etc. It is true that they, more than anyone, are responsible for the archaic copyright laws that we have to live with. But it is also true that they continue to provide a valuable service to creators and that they have being doing this for a long time.

As the copyright system is more or less the same throughout the world this book is a must read in the US or in Argentina. And as Mr. Patry has an agile prose and illustrates his opinion with interesting facts, lawyers and laymen will enjoy and find this book useful.

Bill Patry has published another essential work on copyright law. Drawing on his experience as a congressional staffer working on copyright legislation, his time at the Copyright Office, his many years of legal scholarship (including writing a multi-volume treatise on copyright law and the only specialized treatise on fair use) and many years as a private practice copyright lawyers and litigator, Patry has written two important books geared towards a more general readership. First, with Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars Patry set out his view of how the law of copyright has been distorted by content owners (and their lobbyists) and how extremist rhetoric on both sides of the copyright "wars" have managed to change the law in ways that weaken its ability to serve copyright's original purposes. That book was all about identifying problems.

Now, with How to Fix Copyright, Patry builds upon his prior work and includes various ideas and starting points for solutions. No, as he points out in his forward, he does not extract an over-simplified bullet-point list of action items at the end of the book. Such an approach would be silly and unproductive, given the complexity of the problems and would give a false impression that Patry has (or possibly could) provide simple, pat or "finished" solutions to all of the problems in copyright law. The suggestions are, rather, discussed throughout the book and at the very least provide a helpful starting point for working on the identified problems.

Patry has a true talent for taking highly technical legal issues and writing about them in an engaging way that people, lawyer and non-lawyer alike, can understand. Anyone who has read his more technical legal treatises or knows his other work is aware that as a legal scholar of (and participant in) the development of copyright law Patry knows more about the history and working of copyright than just about any other living person. Even so, Patry is willing to admit that his views on various issues have changed over time, as he has continuously re-examined and tested them. Consequently, his views do not fall neatly on either side of the increasingly polemic public arguments about copyright law. This is exactly why his work is so valuable (and unique).

Of course, precisely because he does not fit neatly into either side of the polemic, he is often the subject of ad hominem attacks from both sides. You will see some of them among the Amazon reviews, notably from individuals who work for the content owner industries (one is a publisher and the other runs a digital right management company and also serves as an expert witness for music, motion picture and other big content companies). One thing about the review of Patry's books is that you can usually tell which ones you should ignore by the amount of vitriol or condescension in them. If you are interested in thinking about the hard issues related to copyright law and have an open mind, ignore the copyright maximalist industry trolls and read this book. It is bound to change the way you think about copyright law, and as Patry points out, changing your mind is the best way to prove you have one.

Patry's previous general-readership book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, called for "reform" of the copyright system without a word about how to achieve it. In his own Amazon.com review of his book, he promised a sequel that would discuss how to reform the copyright system.

Too bad this book isn't it.

The title promises much but the book delivers not much of anything. In fact, apart from a little teaser in the introduction, you have to wait until p. 176 to get any actual ideas about how the system should be reformed. They aren't bad ideas -- shorten the term of copyright, make copyright registration mandatory instead of automatic, pass strong orphan works legislation, etc. -- but little that we haven't heard before from Lessig, Litman, Vaidhyanathan, and various others. There's periodic talk about how copyright is necessary to ensure that content creators get paid, but little about how to fix the system so that this actually happens -- just a lot of material about how the system is unfairly tilted towards the interests of major media companies.

Yet there is one really excellent idea in the book: whatever changes are made to the copyright system, they should be made on the basis of hard evidence (rather than "faith") about how the proposed changes will improve how the system meets its objectives of maximizing the creative works available to the public by providing incentives to content creators. Patry's absolutely right! Unfortunately he offers little advice about *how* such hard evidence is to be obtained. There have been many studies on this subject; most are either methodologically lacking or horribly biased. How we get rid of these defects would have been a far more worthwhile use of the remaining pages in this than the copyleft truisms that occupy them.

By Cory Doctorow:

William Patry is no copyright radical. He's the author of some of the major reference texts on copyright, books that most copyright lawyers would have on their bookcases, books like Patry on Copyright. But Patry -- once copyright counsel to the US House of Representatives and policy planning advisor to the US Register of Copyrights -- is furious with the current state of copyright law, and he's marshalled his considerable knowledge of copyright and combined it with his considerable talent as a writer to produce a new book, How to Fix Copyright, a book that is incandescent in every sense of the word.

How to Fix Copyright is a superbly argued, enraging book on the state of copyright law today, one of the great evidence-free zones in policymaking, where every measure is taken on faith and whose results are never seriously measured (except by tame, partisan researchers who always conclude that more draconian laws are in order). Patry dismantles the arguments for "strong" copyright protection like a top chef deboning a fish, deftly carving away the industry rhetoric and leaving behind the evidence.

The evidence is grim. Bad copyright law, enacted on the basis of flimsy, cooked statistics (or worse, purely anaecdotal "evidence") is not serving to enrich artists, though it is funneling enormous wealth to their corporate publishers, studios and labels (especially the executive suites in those firms, where compensation in the tens of millions is handed out by firms that are "dying of piracy"). These laws are dismantling our culture, criminalizing our children and neighbors, attacking our cherished institutions, and distorting the progress of poor nations around the world.

Throughout the text, Patry offers two important (but rare) commodities: facts, and solutions. Patry's work is heavily footnoted, and his footnotes are generous, sometimes lengthy discursions, often citing primary, peer-reviewed works. Not cooked industry statistics, but impartial evidence from economists, social scientists, and creators modern and ancient. As to solutions, Patry notes that his publisher wanted him to include a list of bullet-point solutions at the end of the book, an approach he rejected because these aren't simple problems -- they're difficult and nuanced, and so are his solutions, so they're best couched in the arguments they refer to. I agree with this approach, though two of Patry's suggestions are simple enough: first, stop making new copyright laws until we know whether the current ones are working (we'll have to define what they're supposed to be doing first!); and second, make no new laws without a strong, impartial evidentiary basis.

Funnily enough, these two suggestions do mark Patry out as a copyright radical by modern standards. Copyright is supposed to be an unassailable doctrine of faith, and asking to see the evidence of supposed gigantic monetary and job losses due to piracy, or supposed gigantic contributions to the GDP and balance of trade as a result of the industries, makes you a loony heretic in the contemporary debate.

Patry currently works as Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, and he is also a clarinetist -- in other words, he is both well-versed in technology and an artist himself. This puts him in a nearly unique position among copyright lawyers, and it's no wonder that he's one of copyright's best scholars. And while How to Fix Copyright is a book full of anger, it's never shrill or strident (though it's a good deal less calm than Patry's previous popular law book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars).

-------

Note: These are not Rodman's words, he's just the conduit. Cory Doctorow posted this review on boingboing.com. Rodman could not say this better.

Patry's How to Fix Copyright: deftly argued, incandescent book on the evidence-free state of copyright law

By Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing)[...]

William Patry is no copyright radical. He's the author of some of the major reference texts on copyright, books that most copyright lawyers would have on their bookcases, books like Patry on Copyright. But Patry -- once copyright counsel to the US House of Representatives and policy planning advisor to the US Register of Copyrights -- is furious with the current state of copyright law, and he's marshaled his considerable knowledge of copyright and combined it with his considerable talent as a writer to produce a new book, How to Fix Copyright, a book that is incandescent in every sense of the word.

How to Fix Copyright is a superbly argued, enraging book on the state of copyright law today, one of the great evidence-free zones in policymaking, where every measure is taken on faith and whose results are never seriously measured (except by tame, partisan researchers who always conclude that more draconian laws are in order). Patry dismantles the arguments for "strong" copyright protection like a top chef deboning a fish, deftly carving away the industry rhetoric and leaving behind the evidence.

The evidence is grim. Bad copyright law, enacted on the basis of flimsy, cooked statistics (or worse, purely anecdotal "evidence") is not serving to enrich artists, though it is funneling enormous wealth to their corporate publishers, studios and labels (especially the executive suites in those firms, where compensation in the tens of millions is handed out by firms that are "dying of piracy"). These laws are dismantling our culture, criminalizing our children and neighbors, attacking our cherished institutions, and distorting the progress of poor nations around the world.

Throughout the text, Patry offers two important (but rare) commodities: facts, and solutions. Patry's work is heavily footnoted, and his footnotes are generous, sometimes lengthy discussions, often citing primary, peer-reviewed works. Not cooked industry statistics, but impartial evidence from economists, social scientists, and creators modern and ancient. As to solutions, Patry notes that his publisher wanted him to include a list of bullet-point solutions at the end of the book, an approach he rejected because these aren't simple problems -- they're difficult and nuanced, and so are his solutions, so they're best couched in the arguments they refer to. I agree with this approach, though two of Patry's suggestions are simple enough: first, stop making new copyright laws until we know whether the current ones are working (we'll have to define what they're supposed to be doing first!); and second, make no new laws without a strong, impartial evidentiary basis.

Funnily enough, these two suggestions do mark Patry out as a copyright radical by modern standards. Copyright is supposed to be an unassailable doctrine of faith, and asking to see the evidence of supposed gigantic monetary and job losses due to piracy, or supposed gigantic contributions to the GDP and balance of trade as a result of the industries, makes you a loony heretic in the contemporary debate.

Patry currently works as Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, and he is also a clarinetist -- in other words, he is both well-versed in technology and an artist himself. This puts him in a nearly unique position among copyright lawyers, and it's no wonder that he's one of copyright's best scholars. And while How to Fix Copyright is a book full of anger, it's never shrill or strident (though it's a good deal less calm than Patry's previous popular law book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars).

If I write, film, act in, play something etc. I can sell my right to your viewing of my work for whatever price I decide - not you. And no amount of erudite, semantically argued, islamic "god owns intelligence" nonsense (which is what it actually is) is of any importance other than to inform me you are a crook if you wish to take that right away from me. Ultimately, the market decides if I overprice my property. Copyright? Today it's all copyWRONG and authors such as this Google apologist (despite his strained caveat) are the problem not the solution. Still worth reading though so you artists know who and where your enemies really are. In bed with technology.