The arrival of the Internet was revolutionary, and one of the most
tumultuous developments that flowed from it–the upending of the
relatively settled world of copyright law–has forced us to completely
rethink how rights to a work are allocated and how delivery formats
affect an originator’s claims to the work. Most of the disputes swirling
around novel Internet media delivery systems, from Napster to Youtube
to the Google Book Project, derive from our views on what constitutes a
proper understanding of copyright. Who has the right to a work, and to
what extent should we protect a rights holder’s ability to derive income
from it? Is it right to make copyrighted works free of charge?

One
of the central figures in this decade-plus long debate has been William
Patry, who is now the Senior Copyright Counsel for Google. In How to Fix Copyright,
he offers a concise and pithy set of solutions for improving our
increasingly outmoded copyright system. After outlining how we arrived
at our current state of dysfunction, Patry offers a series of pragmatic
fixes that steer a middle course between an overly expansive
interpretation of copyright protection and abandoning it altogether. We
have to accept that we cannot force people to buy copyrighted works, but
at the same time, we have to enforce laws against counterfeiting. Most
importantly, we have to look at the evidence–what furthers creativity
yet does not deny protection to those who need it to create? We should
also reject the increasingly strident (and, he argues, ill-informed)
denunciations of delivery systems: Google Booksearch and DVRs are merely
technologies, and are not the problem. Throughout, he stresses that we
need to recognize that the consumer is king. Law can only solve legal
problems, not business problems, and too often we use law to solve
business problems. Practical yet prescriptive, How to Fix Copyright will
reshape our understanding of what the real problems actually are and
help us navigate through the increasingly complex dilemmas surrounding
authorship and rights in our digital age.

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