October 2017 521 C&RL News

Carrie Russell is director of the Program on Public 
Access to Information, ALA’s Washington Office, email: 
crussell@alawash.org

W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n eCarrie Russell

The Patterson Award: Honoring 
leadership in copyright
Each year ALA’s Office for Information 
Technology Policy (OITP) presents the Pat-
terson Award to individuals or groups who 
have made significant and consistent con-
tributions to the pursuit of balanced copy-
right principles while working in an area of 
information policy, law, libraries, or library 
education. 

The origin of the honor goes back to 
the ALA Annual Conference in 2002, when 
OITP decided to recognize legal scholar L. 
Ray Patterson by establishing an award in 
his name—the “L. Ray Patterson Copyright 
Award: In support of users’ rights.” 

Patterson advised U.S. Rep. Bob Kasten-
maier during the drafting of the Copyright 
Law of 1976. Kastenmaier said that Patter-
son’s contributions to American copyright 
law were profound and that he brought 
“fairness, balance and understanding the 
copyright law.” Twenty years later, many of 
Patterson’s ideas were thought to be radical. 
Patterson merely argued that the copyright 
law’s purpose was to advance learning to 
benefit the public. He maintained that the 
law, due to private interests, was becoming 
too one-sided, favoring rights holders over 
the public interest. He urged librarians to 
fight for fair use and challenge the scholarly 
journal publishers. 

Then as now, Patterson’s reasoning is the 
copyright policy position of ALA. His 1991 
book The Nature of Copyright: A Law of Us-
ers’ Rights (written with Stanley W. Lindberg) 
has come to be the definitive work on the 
constitutional underpinnings of copyright and 
the critical importance of the public domain.  

Fast forward to October 2017, when the 
Patterson awardee is Jonathan Band, copy-
right attorney at policybandwidth. For more 

than 20 years he has represented libraries 
and technology associations on copyright 
legislation and policy before Congress, the 
Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch, and 
internationally. He has written public com-
ments, letters, testimony, and countless state-
ments supporting balanced and fair copyright 
on behalf of the Library Copyright Alliance 
(LCA), libraries, and library users. ALA Presi-
dent James Neal, also a copyright policy ex-
pert, had this to say when he presented the 
award at a reception in Washington, D.C.: 

Jonathan Band has guided the library 
community over two decades through 
the challenges of the copyright legal 
and legislative battles. His deep un-
derstanding of our community and 
the needs of our users, in combination 
with his remarkable knowledge and 
supportive style, has raised our under-
standing of copyright and our commit-
ment to balanced interpretations and 
applications of the law.

The praise is well-earned. Band has been 
the counsel behind countless LCA positions 
and victories. He has penned over a dozen 
legal briefs on behalf of LCA, including the 
influential Kirstaeng v. Wiley, where the 
Supreme Court ruled that first sale doctrine 
applied to books purchased abroad. Band 
represented libraries throughout the Authors 
Guild v. Google and Authors Guild v. Ha-
thiTrust cases, whose rulings advanced the 
concept of transformative fair use. Band also 
has represented U.S. libraries at the World 
Intellectual Property Organization in support 
of the first international copyright excep-
tion—the Marrakesh Treaty—that would 
allow the making of accessible copies for 
the print-disabled and shared across borders. 

Band’s career has been dedicated to bal-
anced copyright principles, and his direct 
connection to libraries makes this year’s Pat-
terson Award all the more appropriate. 

mailto:crussell%40alawash.org?subject=