Recently Amazon released their Kindle internationally. I immediately ordered one. The first book I bought for it was Patry’s.
When reviewing it, the first thing I need to point out is that the author is Senior Copyright Counsel at Google.
The first reason is that the author does not want people to note this fact when discussing the book, as he writes in his “Disclaimer”. Under the copyright system Patry’s book is attacking, authors get to control many things. What reviewers write about their books is not among them.
The second reason is that while Patry states that Google does not share the views expressed in this book in his “Disclaimer”, I happen to think that is not true.
One example is the discussion of Associated Press and their approach to the question of copyright in relation to Internet search engines in chapter nine. I would be very surprised to learn that Google does not share the view that they don’t need a license from website authors for their core web search business, or the same old tired reasoning that authors agree to everything because they don’t edit their robots.txt file.
Actually, if one were to imagine what book an author named “Google” would write about copyright policy, one would expect a position strongly critical of copyright, since copyright is a threat to Google’s business. As it happens, that seems to be exactly how this one turned out. If one where to believe Patry, there is actually no reason for copyright to exist, and he closes with the idea that copyright might be taken away completely (last sentence of his “Conclusion”).
And while we don’t really know about what “Google” might say about the author’s positions in this book, it is probably reasonable to assume that Mr. Patry won’t be Senior Copyright Counsel for or representing in court the RIAA anytime soon.
The most space in the book is dedicated to the idea that people should tone down their rhetoric when discussing copyright. I have much sympathy for that idea. On this blog, I have pointed out six years ago that calling copyright violators “pirates” is the equivalent of calling copyright owners “slave traders”, or that “enemies of freedom” might be another interesting suggestion to counterstrike.
However, if you are interested in stopping metaphors from confusing the discussion, you should really not have “copyright war” in the title of your book and of many subchapters. You should also refrain from describing Digital Rights Management as “the equivalent of letting copyright owners put a chastity belt on someone else’s wife”, as Patry does in the subchapter “The Digital Millenium Act” in Chapter 8.
This does not strike me as an appropriate thing to say, even if the main idea of the book was not an appeal to get rid of colorful rhetoric in the field.
It is also not in the interest of avoiding metaphors when the author compares policy makers to “vampires” (in Chapter Nine, subchapter “How Innovation Occurs”). I am sure Jack Valenti would never have tried to influence policy makers by comparing them to the Boston Strangler.
Another interesting sentence was this one:
“According to the copyright industries, once they lose control they lose their ability to lose money” (in the Introduction).
That is obviously a typo, but an amusing one.
As for the discussion of Digital Rights Management, I find myself confirmed once more in my position that DRM can be effective. As Patry writes on the Amazon Kindle:
“Amazon.com’s Kindle ebook reader has more digital locks than CIA headquarters, designed to ensure that Amazon’s costumers will have to use the Kindle even if a superior, cheaper alternative is developed.”
That is of course one more metaphor, the use of which we all should refrain from. But Patry is right. The Kindle does come with strong DRM. I for one am completely unable to defeat it.
And actually, I don’t see any need to defeat it. I am perfectly happy right now with the fact that I can read Patry’s book 60 seconds after buying it, and at a lower price compared with the printed edition. The Kindle works rather nicely.
I don’t understand why the author feels that Japan is a special model for the future of copyright policy. In the subchapter he dedicates to discussing Japan, he mentions that Japan has the world’s fastest Internet access and that people write novels for mobile phone screens, both of which are true but have nothing to do with what Japanese copyright does different from American copyright. There are interesting developments in Japanese copyright law, for example the new exception for search engines introduced this year, but one would not know about them from reading Patry’s book.
The author has a blog specially dedicated to discussing this book.