Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Copyright treatise’ author and, for the past few years, Google’s copyright counsel William Patry has recently published a new book with Oxford University Press bearing the title “Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars”.

I was among those who deeply regretted (though fully understood) Mr. Patry’s decision to discontinue his popular blog on copyright about a year ago. Therefore, I was particularly delighted to learn that Patry has decided to start a new blog devoted to his new book.

The book centers on “[t]he way we have come to talk about copyright - metaphoric language demonizing everyone involved - has led to bad business and bad policy decisions.” I haven’t gotten to read the whole book yet (it lays high up on my growing pile of must-read-but-not-yet-read books), but from first impression it seems to have a sharp focus on language, metaphors and the way our discourse – that is, the specific manner in which we debate issues of copyright law – influences our judgments, views, policies and ultimately, operational decisions.

In fact, revising common tokens of speech and widespread metaphors – first among which is the “property metaphor” – is part of a more ambitious move of adopting and underpinning a fundamentally new way of thinking about copyright, not as “intellectual property” but rather as a set of social relations. In his first post, Patry writes:

I regard copyright as a set of social relations, and not as a property right. The advantage in regarding copyright as a system of social relationships is that it focuses attention where it belongs: in mediating conflicts within that system, and not, as the copyright as property model does, by positing ownership of a property right in the Blackstonian sense of exercising absolute dominion as the natural state of affairs, and by regarding every effort to regulate for the public interest to be a hostile act that must be ferociously fought against as if it is an existential threat.

I have little doubt that the book and the new blog will provide a wonderfully vibrant forum for all of us who are interested in these questions and wish to actively or passively participate in a fascinating debate that, in the end, affects all of us.