William Patry

William “Bill” Patry is a partner in Mayer Brown's Intellectual Property practice in New York.

Prior to joining Mayer Brown, Bill spent 17 years as senior copyright counsel at Google, where he founded the company’s in-house copyright counsel group. He advised on key copyright issues and was the principal team lead for public policy work globally, most recently in Israel on fair use, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), and previously in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore. Bill was also engaged in internal company discussions regarding AI, machine learning and copyright.

Over the course of his career, Bill has worked in private practice, and as a senior official at the US Copyright Office, a lead congressional staffer on copyright legislation and a law professor. He is the author of two of the most widely cited legal treatises on copyright law, Patry on Copyright and Patry on Fair Use. These treatises and Bill’s other writings have been cited approximately 1,000 times by federal courts, including many times by the US Supreme Court, most recently in its decision in the Andy Warhol case.

• San Francisco State University, BS
• San Francisco State University, MA
• University of Houston Law Center, JD

• District of Columbia
• New York