Google's Patry on "Patry on Copyright"

It would be hard to imagine a more definitive study of the field of copyright than this: over 5,500 pages, in seven volumes, occupying 25 in./63 cm of shelf space. Although there are no figures on the weight, these are clearly weighty tomes.

It takes a particular kind of individual to devote seven years of their life to writing such a treatise (and goodness knows how many more acquiring the ability to do so), but the author, Bill Patry, seems to have the perfect biography for the task:

Bill Patry is a renowned expert on Copyright Law who currently serves as Senior Copyright Counsel to Google Inc., where he is involved in diverse cutting edge issues. Patry has practiced copyright law for 25 years, 12 years of which have been in private practice, including appellate advocacy. He has been cited numerous times in landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

As a full-time law professor for 5 years and an adjunct for another 5 at the Georgetown University Law Center, Mr. Patry appreciates the importance of teaching and scholarship.

From his eight years in working in the U.S. House of Representatives and Copyright Office, Patry is familiar with the nitty-gritty of legislation and the broader policy issues that Congress deals with. He has testified before Congress, and been retained as an expert witness on numerous occasions.

Patry is the author of numerous law review articles and several books. He also served as editor or editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA for over ten years.

Given the centrality of Patry's expertise for many of the areas covered in this blog - notably open content and open source, to say nothing of intellectual monopolies - and his current position at Google, which allows him a privileged perspective on the online world, I thought it would be interesting to ask him a few questions about his work.

Glyn Moody: As background to yourself, could you say briefly what exactly the Senior Copyright Counsel to Google does - what sort of things do you get involved in that readers might know about?

Bill Patry: Google's legal department is uniquely organized. We have the traditional litigation and transactional lawyers, but we also have "product counsel," counsel who work on particular products, like Books or Videos. We also have policy and government relations lawyers. People tend not to be segregated though, and will work on projects across what in a law firm would be called a department. And that's my role par excellence: I deal with copyright issues wherever they arise.

Glyn Moody: How did the copyright treatise come about - is it something you'd been dreaming of doing for years? Was there any particular inspiration?

Bill Patry: The book started out as a second edition to an earlier work and had I stuck with that, it woudn't have taken so long. But I got into a dispute with my prior publisher, pulled the book, rewrote it almost entirely and expanded it about three fold. My idea was to write a book that drew on all the things I done and to also rethink the way legal treatises are written and used. Blogging has been an important part of that process, making the exchange of ideas interactive and not just one-way.

Glyn Moody: Could you give a few facts and figures about it for those of us who won't have the opportunity to get our hands on the real thing?

Bill Patry: The book is 7 volumes, no appendices, about 5,832 pages, 25 chapters. It is the first new multivolume treatise on copyright law in the U.S. in 17 years, is the largest by almost 100% (in text), and is I think one of the largest legal treatises even written by a single individual.

Glyn Moody: How will the The Patry Treatise Blog function alongside the book? What do you hope to achieve by creating it?

Bill Patry: I have high hopes for the blog as helping in a number of respects. It provides a way for people to give me feedback, suggest things, ask me what I meant etc. All of us have read things and have not been sure what the author meant. We're reluctant to ask the author and it takes time to write letters. With a blog, you can do it quickly, easily, and get very fast answers. I also want to be able to provide readers with important updates before the actual updates come out and to try out concepts.

Glyn Moody: Looking to the future, do you think there will ever be another such hardcopy treatise on copyright, or is this the last one before everything is purely online? Any hope the next one will be free and accessible to all?

Bill Patry: I'm not a futurist; I can't understand the past or present, much less the future.

Glyn Moody: As a copyright scholar, what's your view of Richard Stallman's GNU GPL, which draws its power from copyright? Is there any weakness in the GPL's approach to granting software freedoms from a copyright point of view?

Bill Patry: I met Stallman about 20 years ago, but haven't folllowed him since.

Glyn Moody: What impact do you think Google and its various projects will have on the field of copyright?

Bill Patry: Don't know.

Glyn Moody: From a historical perspective, how important do you think open content and the Creative Commons movement will prove? Are we moving from one copyright era to another? Is the role of copyright changing?

Bill Patry: I think Creative Commons has been wonderful in providing a way for people to license their works as they see fit. Recently, I did a post on the "Long Tail" and its effect on copyright. Copyright is an economic right and it will follow, willingly or not, where the market eventually goes.

Glyn Moody: From a theoretical viewpoint, in the best of all possible worlds, how would copyright evolve to create a legal structure that allows all these new kinds of uses to flourish? Similarly, drawing on your knowledge of copyright in the past and present, how do you think copyright will actually evolve - both in the US, and globally - in the short term and longer term?

Bill Patry: I think copyright has become less and less responsive to the balance of incentives and exceptions that the 18th century English common judges grasped intuitively. Our ability to adapt has been seriously hampered by trade agreements, and that's a big problem.

Glyn Moody: Do you have any words of advice for people like Larry Lessig who are trying to change the legal framework of copyright to allow more sharing and collaboration?

Bill Patry: I have trouble enough figuring out my own problems.

Glyn Moody: Any other comments you'd like to make about your treatise or copyright?

Bill Patry: Please buy it, use it, and give me feedback.