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Patry Copyright Blog Closed
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "William Patry, noted copyright expert and Google's top copyright lawyer, has decided to close his personal blog. (For no reason that he has explained, the archives are gone too.) Ordinarily, that wouldn't be very newsworthy, but that little blog has made a lot of news, outing the ACTA treaty and discussing lots of other important pending legislation. Mr. Patry gives two reasons for the closure: his personal views were being attributed to Google, and the current trends in copyright law are too depressing. Though I am not the only one to have done so, as someone who has contributed to that misunderstanding by listing his credentials without a disclaimer, I would like to publicly apologize to him. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do to reverse the depressing trends in copyright law that I'm not doing already."
Or a wannabe martyr?
Mr. Patry gives two reasons for the closure: his personal views were being attributed to Google, and the current trends in copyright law are too depressing .
The first reason is probably valid, and Patry is correct in wanting to clearly differentiate his views from Google's. (While most people would just slap "The views expressed here are my own and do not represent my employer's ..." boilerplate on their blog and call it a day, its a free Intertubes.)
The second reason reads more like pure frustration and petulance than anything else. His pulling the archived material is likely a part of this martyrdom.
I do wish that Mr. Patry would come on down off that cross - we need the wood.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
This whole copyright business is depressing alright, mainly because those who are allegedly "our" politicians are working against us as a result of corporate $$$-based lobbying, which would be known as bribery in more enlightened societies.
Well fine, if that's how the system works then why don't *WE* bribe our politicians too? Dozens of millions of citizens are affected by this media-led crap, hundreds of millions of people worldwide, so surely we can afford the bribes?
It shouldn't be necessary to bribe those who in theory should be representing us, but if that's the only way to make them work for the people, then we should do it. If we don't, then the next step will be to employ contract hit men to make the politicians "see sense", and that's not a step to be taken lightly. But bribery appears to be acceptable in current society. So how about it?
Although I'm sure that Patry had an excellent Blog, the cynic in me thinks that there is only one real reason why the archives are now off line. This is probably fear that some of his earlier statements are now inconsistent with his high level legal position at Google. That is, he is concerned that an opponent might try to twist his words in the Blog against him.
He's made it clear that Google, the company, is not directly involved with the closing of his blog. I've read and respect Patry enough to believe that if something along those cynical lines was the case, he'd pretty much say so.
We shouldn't let 'fair use' be 'redefined' either, but you don't get to be a hypocrite. You have to consistently vote in officials that will respect laws, and not try to 'muscle' and 'redefine' them to your side's political position. That's not a government of the people, but a regime of a single party.
I'm no lawyer, but I know a little about law anyhow. Mr. Patry is one of the heavyweight scholars of copyright law, not some random nobody on Slashdot like me.
His blog was very important. Like TFS says, it broke the news on the ACTA treaty, which would still be secret if not for him. Lawyers read his books to learn about copyright law. His blog was incredibly useful to find out all the latest happenings in copyright law, which is only getting crazier now that it's being rewritten to appease Disney and to try to deal with the internet, which most politicians don't understand on a deeper level than "it's not a big truck, it's a series of tubes."
So losing him is a big deal and it sucks. There simply aren't many people who could ever hope to replace him. Groklaw, Ars Technica and NYCL are all great, don't get me wrong.
But they simply lack the authority someone like Mr. Patry can bring to the table. He will be missed.
This is going to end up, (already ending up really) like prohibition in the 1930, where certain narrow interests managed to get laws in place that the silent majority refused to follow.
My rights don't need management.
It seems that left wing politicians who supposedly abhor big business are just as pro IP as everyone else.
Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner!
Are you going to vote for a Republican, or a Democrat? Also, would you prefer to be raped anally, or in the butt?
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Well, let's clarify: It's Western nations that are moving toward stricter and stricter IP laws.
Why? Because we can't compete with cheap labor from other countries, at least not while maintaining anything near the standard of living we're accustomed to. For better or worse, we didn't really try to (though likely couldn't even if we did); we were content to let those "old economy" jobs go away in favor of "new economy" jobs, like computer programming and our content creators.
Many of these things don't work at all without IP laws, but even those that do work much better--from a western perspective--the stronger the laws are and the more rigorously they are enforced.
In short, countries keep pushing for stricter and stricter laws, and try to force similar laws on other countries via trade agreements and such, because they're the underpinnings of our economy these days. It's one of the few things we export.