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Andrew Katz is partner and head of the IT/IP team at Moorcrofts LLP, a boutique law firm based in the Thames Valley providing corporate and commercial advice to knowledge-based industries. Andrew qualified as a barrister and requalified (and now practises) as a solicitor. He financed his way through bar school by jobbing as a (fairly incompetent) programmer (in turbo pascal). He now specialises in free and open source software law and has written and lectured widely. He is a founder editor of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, a fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe and advises businesses and communities on free and open source licensing and strategy worldwide. He is slightly obsessive about live music. These are his opinions, and not those of his firm.

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What is copyright for?

Can it be a tool for mass participation?

Published 12:10, 25 November 10

There’s a great piece by Cory Doctorow here. In a nutshell: decide what copyright is for, and then make sure it does what it’s supposed to.

I’m a big fan of Bill Patry, copyright scholar, and one of the senior lawyers at Google. He essentially makes the same point in his great book: Moral Panics and The Copyright Wars.

I reviewed it here.

Incidentally, Doctorow believes that copyright’s job is: “to encourage the widest participation in culture that we can manage - that is, it should be a system that encourages the most diverse set of creators, creating the most diverse set of works, to reach the most diverse audiences as is practical”.

I can’t disagree with that.

Tags: copyright, law, moorcrofts, open source