Christmas in January for copyright lawyers
I guess Santa got my letter after all. William Patry's much-awaited copyright law treatise has been published in seven volumes by Thomson/West, here, with a foreword by Sandra Day O'Connor, no less. I can't wait to start using it.
According to Patry, "I did 100% of the research and writing, never using assistants of any kind." Having worked back in law school as a research assistant on Professor Goldstein's treatise, I have some sense of the nature of this undertaking and am in awe of it. The table of contents alone is 82 pages, with sections called: "The straw man of legislative history: a textualist powerplay" and "the court's bait-and-switch approach to the use of legislative history".
Patry says in his blog post:
"I think the chapter on statutory interpretation (chapter 2, 284 pages), will be a surprise to those who have assumed that the textualist approach to statutes is the dominant approach, even on the Supreme Court. The chapter represents a painstaking effort to document actual practices. I read far in excess of 1,000 cases, hundreds of law review articles, dozens of books, and of course drawn on my own 8 years in drafting statutes while a federal legislative branch attorney."
He also has started a new blog to support the treatise, called the The Patry Treatise Blog, which I am sure will be a valuable resource in its own right:
"The purpose of this new blog is to start breaking down the one-way nature of treatise writing: I want to provide a forum where people can react to the book and I can both respond and provide further thoughts on things I have written or am thinking about putting in the next supplement."
If you don't yet follow his work, you'll want to. Here's a brief excerpt of Patry's accomplishments:
"Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc. Formerly copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, formerly Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights, formerly Law Professor, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; author of numerous treatises and articles (including one on fair use with Judge Richard Posner), including the 7 volume treatise on "Patry on Copyright."
Cathy Kirkman is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California. Her practice focuses on intellectual