Copyright in Historical Perspective

Lyman Ray Patterson (1929-2003) was a law professor, copyright scholar, and a historian. He joined the faculty of the Vanderbilt University Law School in 1963 and taught there for a decade. He later went on to serve as Dean at the Emory University School of Law.He is the namesake of the American Library Association’s “L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award,” which “recognizes contributions of an individual or group that pursues and supports the Constitutional purpose of the U.S. Copyright Law, fair use, and the public domain.”

“The major contributions made by lawyers to the history of copyright date from the late 1960s when, within a year of each other, two American scholars, Benjamin Kaplan and Lyman Ray Patterson, published their works. Of these two books Patterson’s offers the most detailed account of the development of copyright.”