Patry's MORAL PANICS AND THE COPYRIGHT WARS: elegant, calm, reasonable history of the copyfight

Few people are as qualified to write a book about the copyright wars as William Patry: former copyright counsel to the US House of Reps, advisor the Register of Copyrights, Senior Copyright Counsel for Google, and author of the seven-volume Patry on Copyright, widely held to be the single most authoritative work on US copyright ever written.

And Patry has written a very fine book indeed: Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars is every bit as authoritative as Patry on Copyright (although much, much shorter) and is absolutely accessible to a lay audience.

There are many legal scholars who've written about the copyright wars, from Pam Samuelson to Larry Lessig to Jonathan Zittrain to James Boyle, and in this exalted company, Patry's Moral Panics stands out for the sheer, unadorned calm of his approach. Patry doesn't have a lot of rhetorical flourish or prose fireworks. Instead, he tells the story of copyright in plain, thoughtful words, with much rigor and grace. Reading Moral Panics is like watching a master brick layer gracefully and effortlessly build a solid wall: no wasted motion, no sweat, no missteps. Patry knows this subject better than anyone and can really explain it.

As the title implies, Patry places the copyright wars amid other moral panics -- think of witch-hunts (both the "Communist" and the old-fashioned "witch") -- and he devotes much of the book to the sociology of moral panic, the views of the Greeks on language and metaphor, and the weaponizing of language (and the especial use which the terms "theft" and "piracy" have in this regard) and the ways that historical figures like Jack Valenti used this rhetoric to shift the debate. Patry uses his immense knowledge of the law and history to show how publishers and entertainment companies have spent literally centuries arguing for "artist rights" when it comes to fighting technological innovation, but deriding those same rights in their dealings with actual artists.

Patry also shows how artists have stolen, borrowed and copied from one another for all of history, and how even the most "original" artists derive their works from those around and before them.

He shows how the debate has been skewed through the use of shoddy statistics (for example, the oft-touted $250 billion/750,000 jobs in annual US piracy losses, which turns out to be a decades-old, half-remembered, vastly inflated, and entirely unscientific extrapolation of a rough estimate of the losses due to fake tractor parts.

He reserves his greatest arguments for the US 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the attempts to expand its remarkable control into new realms -- the newspapers who want the right to stop you from quoting even five words from their stories, the movie studios who want to disconnect you from the Internet because they believe -- but can't prove -- that you're infringing copyright. This is the part of the debate that usually has me frothing at the chops, but Patry remains admirably calm as he carries this off, explaining in terms that anyone can understand the terrible violence that this kind of monopoly control does to our discourse, the arts, and competition and innovation.

Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars

• [tp1024]

  I would buy it as plain txt for $1.50 via paypal.

  That’s not much more than the author would get if I bought the non-existent paperback.

  I could buy 10 books for $1.50 instead of 1 book for $15 if only it wasn’t for all the money going down the drain because of the publisher, printing the book, making the paper, shipping the book etc.

  I could support 10 times as many authors. I’d actually prefer that to a CC release, since a CC release usually means that the publisher of the dead tree book will not allow the author to take any money at all for the digital version.

  I understand that publishers provide editors and other services, but this is not worth paying for the printing, shipping and dead tree as well. If you feel like you can’t publish a proper Ebook without an editor, then hire an editor to do your editing, not a publisher.

• [tp1024]

  If only I could afford to buy the book.

• [Tdawwg]

  I could buy 10 books for $1.50 instead of 1 book for $15 if only it wasn’t for all the money going down the drain because of the publisher, printing the book, making the paper, shipping the book etc.

  Oh, yeah, damn those copyeditors, designers, printers, damn the physical product that takes up so much space. Damn having a product that will last practically forever, and not need constant updating, maintenance, and restoration. Damn the experts who work on the book and help to make it such a factual and useful tool. All that wasted money!

  I understand that publishers provide editors and other services, but this is not worth paying for the printing, shipping and dead tree as well.

  Compared to the huge amounts of $$$ that’s spent keeping the Internet up and running, the costs to print a book and ship it are miniscule: and those are one-off costs, spent once, and never needing to be renewed. The two can’t even be compared usefully.

• [Anonymous]

  Hrmmmm… How to find this book in Korea for Not $10k in Shipping Costs…

  This book needs to go creative commons. :P

• [Anonymous]

  @Tdawwg: The lifetime cost of owning a paper book is far higher than the lifetime cost of owning a digital book. Some costs you leave out: the extra square footage you must rent or own to store your books (expensive), the effort you must put into dusting and keeping the books reasonably dry so they don’t get moldy (time consuming), the bigger truck you have to rent and more gasoline you have to buy to move, the risk of getting a hernia from moving heavy things, the extra cost of fire insurance, the nuisance of keeping inventory manually, on and on.

  Yes, it’s true you can still read a paper book while the power’s out, if it’s daylight. The cost of burning one candle is comparable to the cost of electricity to recharge a Kindle for a year’s use.

  Your arguments hold more water when talking about the costs of delivering BluRay movies on disc or over the Internet. 25GB is more cheaply stored on disc than hard drive, for now. Tiny files like books are nearly free to send and store. The amount of information transferred and stored as email and web pages completely dwarfs the amount in books. The amount in video dwarfs that number. Scientific data is gigantic as well.

• [Anonymous]

  Further review at ars technica:
  http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/big-content-using-moral-panics-to-change-copyright-law.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

• [Anonymous]

  I bought it along with Cory’s “Content”, and received it from Amazon last week. It takes a great approach to the problem by explaining how language has been used by those involved to distort what should be the real issue regarding copyright, that it is being used to slow down innovation in order to protect a top-down business model.

• [dwiff]

  And sadly, the reasoned, informed arguments of the leading American expert on copyright laws falls on the deaf ears of the Congress he used to advise.

• [Matthew_H]

  Aye, if only it was available under CC. I’m pretty sure Mr. Patry will do some sort of an open release; it would be in the spirit of the work – but releasing it under CC is a gift he is free not to give.

  Hopefully something will come out someday soon though, because buying the book as it is is simply not an option for me. Or I’ll come back to it some other time.

• [Greg Weeks]

  He’s got a blog up about the book too. It’s been pretty interesting so far.

  http://moralpanicsandthecopyrightwars.blogspot.com/

• [Anonymous]

  if only it was available under CC, no?