This book was infuriating.
The "evidence" presented is fatally wounded by a rather strict music industry-wide perspective. In the author's arguments, individual artists exist only as part of the stable of big distributors. He pays only awkward lip-service to literature. Art and photography are largely ignored.
William Patry frequently whispers that he thinks copyright is valuable, while loudly presenting evidence that copyright ought to be abolished, but without actually saying that it should. It's all terribly one-sided, and with anything one-sided, neither informative nor illuminating. Reading "How To Fix Copyright" feels like being hammered with propaganda, though I have no doubt the book will be loved by the already-converted who don't mind some extra preaching. This book argues against copyright protection throughout, peppered with denials of doing just that.
He boldly makes the argument that copyright doesn't promote creativity by presenting data so narrow in focus and so biased that it is downright insulting to the creatives. In essence, creative people are creative anyway, they can't help themselves! The unexplored implication here is that even if artists were starving from reductions to their ability to profit from the self-distribution of their work, they would continue making more creations anyway, so why feed the artists? Self-distribution? Oops, that doesn't register for Mr Patry
The author is shockingly oblivious, for a guy who wants cultural practice to completely bend over to technological advances, to the web's as a portal for individuals to broadcast their own work, and profit from this distribution, completely outside of an industrial umbrella. These individuals are the people that need copyright protection (I'm not privy to industry's needs, admittedly). Image copyright barely gets a mention, yet the online world is one where the visual representation of an object is often worth many times more than the object itself.
Even his notions of copying (not related to the music business) are outdated. The internet has created the image as a product, and with that, the viewing of an image as consumption of that product. While I do agree with the author that the making of physical copies for personal use is harmless, as they do not compete with the profitable online distribution and consumption of these images, the copying of the same content for further broadcast on the internet itself does harm self-publishers, and hurt their search engine rankings. You'd think someone so in love with information technology would pause to consider the consequences of "copied content" penalties imposed by search engines on artist website traffic and visibility, outside of the copyright implications. None of these considerations enter the author's radar - maybe he still thinks that photographers make all their money from licensing to Vogue and National Geographic.
The author has the gall to make the economic argument that copyright protection represents a deadweight loss to society, like monopolies do. If that's even true, the deadweight "gain" from removing copyright is from robbing individuals of their intellectual property and eroding at their ability to make money from it. Conveniently, no self-sustaining self-publisher has been consulted in the writing of this book.
In summary, the author's arguments are too focused on the music industry and aggregated distribution of intellectual property, based on antiquated business models, misses the boat on how self-publishers derive incomes on the internet, fails to give artists a voice, and beats the point that copyrights are hurting us all with biased data while pretending to be unbiased.
Zero stars from me.
