p2pnet - rss feed: William Patry Copyright Blog returns!
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Excellent news! William Patry is back online.
Or he will be, probably by tomorrow.
Senior copyright counsel at Google, he decided to take his site offline because among other things, “The current state of copyright law is too depressing,” he posted.
He was a copyright counsel to the US House of Representatives in the early 1990s and also worked as a policy planning advisor to the Register of Copyrights, says the Wikipedia.
In addition, he was professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and is the author of Patry on Copyright, a seven-volume treatise on US copyright law.
When he announced his decison to take the site down, under ‘The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing, among other things, he stated »»»
I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.
Now, “The voice of the people has been heard,” he posts, going on »»»
I will restore the posts, hopefully by tomorrow. This is not what I would prefer, but I respect that almost everyone else feels differently, other than those anonymous posters who were happy for the blog to go anyway. As I mentioned before, because I laboriously deleted the posts one-by-one, I needed a tool to capture the actual URLs for each post, which isn’t as easy as it sounds since the URL did not always match the title of the blog. Thanks to Peter Ecklersley, who developed very cool tool to capture the URLs, and the great Blogger support team, almost all have been recaptured. They were recaptured as drafts though and there are posting limits that have to be overridden, so some work needs to be done yet. I will also try and cross reference those posts that were not captured and add them later.
Because so many people wrote asking for an archive, I will also compile an archive and send it to those who asked for it. That archive will not contains comments because the actual posts will be available for people to access. Deleting the comments from the archived posts will helpfully reduce the size of the archive, and avoid unanswered questions about the status of comments.
Thanks all of you for your kind words, and I hope restoring the links will show will my appreciation.
Welcome back.
JN
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New York Times - xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, August xx, 2008
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