The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing.
William Patry has announced that he will be pulling the plug on The Patry Copyright Blog. Among his reasons were the constant tendency of readers to attribute his comments to his employer and his feeling that copyright law no longer serves the purposes for which it was created.
“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.”
I’m not sure that there will ever be another copyright blog as interesting, insightfull or written by someone with such keen understanding of the issues. We’ll miss you.
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