Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars

William Patry has launched a new blog, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel at Google and author of a leading authority on US copyright law, previously wrote a blog for several years but ultimately drew it to a close last year. The new blog is designed to discuss issues raised by his latest book:

‘The book itself is an attempt to change the discourse on copyright, away from the phony moral panics that surround every new technology and seemingly every dispute about copyright. 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. Conversely, when we regard copyright as a set of social relationships, we can ditch the calls for its abolition: what we should want is not the absence of a copyright law, but rather an effective copyright law.’

‘Blogs have amazing capacity for interaction and improving learning,’ Patry says. ‘I will do my part to keep the discourse high-minded and non-partisan.’