One of the best personal copyright blogs around has called it quits, The Patry Copyright Blog. William Party has been blogging for at least 3 years through his time in private practice and during his current position as Senior Copyright Counsel at Google. Loosing him from the blogesphere is a great loss.
The reasons he gave for giving up blogging are two fold:
End of the Blog
I have decided to end the blog, after doing around 800 postings over about 4 years. I regret closing the blog and I owe readers an explanation. There are two reasons.
1. The Inability or Refusal to Accept the Blog for What it is: A Personal Blog
For the first year after joining Google, with some exceptions, people honored the personal nature of the blog, but no longer. When other blogs or news stories refer to the blog, the inevitable opening sentence now is: “William Patry, Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel said,” or “Google’s top copyright lawyer said… .” There is nothing I can do to stop this false implication that I am speaking on Google’s behalf. And that’s just those who do so because they are lazy. …
2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing
This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. 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.
(emphasis added)
The Patry blog was always a great read. I respected his logic and perspective. It appears that he has removed, unpublished the whole blog. This is the second high profile presonal IP blog to leave recently. The other being Troll Tracker Cisco IP Director Rick Frenkel. I hope that this does not become a trend.
PS: The Internet Archive has a back log of the Patry blog but not Troll Tracker. I would download a copy for personal use ASAP.
