Proposal to reboot and de-cruft US Copyright Law

So Pam wants to revisit copyright, redraft it from the start, refactoring it like a Wikipedia article that has grown too large and weird to be properly understood. This is a capital idea, and her very concrete suggestions set out both a plan of attack and a set of principles that would make copyright safe for the age of the Internet.

By focusing on these core elements of copyright, I do not mean to suggest that nothing but these elements should be in a model copyright law or principles document. Yet perhaps anything else nominated for inclusion in the model law or principles should have to be accompanied by a justification as to why it needs to be there, and why it should not be achieved through common law evolution of copyright law by judges or delegated to an administrative rule-making process.102

A model copyright law should also be written in plain English so ordinary people, and not just the high priests of copyright, can understand what it means and the normative reason that it should be part and parcel of the basic statutory framework.103 A model copyright law should also articulate the purposes that it seeks to achieve and offer some guidance about how competing interests should be balanced, perhaps through a series of comments on the model law or principles.104