Preliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform

Incoming Berkman faculty fellow Pam Samuelson begins her recently released paper, "Preliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform," by stating that:

Myriad reasons can be proffered for undertaking a copyright reform project. For one thing, the current U.S. copyright law is way too long, now weighing at approximately two hundred pages long.1 The statute is also far too complex, incomprehensible to a significant degree, and imbalanced in important ways.2 It lacks, moreover, normative heft. That is, the normative rationales for ranting authors some protections for their works and for limiting the scope of that protection are difficult to extract from the turgid prose of its many exceptionally detailed provisions.

At the paper's end, she concludes that "...no reasonable person could contest the idea that a simpler, more comprehensible, and more balanced copyright law would be a good idea."

In between, the paper contains the framework of what such a copyright reform project would entail, with thoughts on key intellectual property concerns, practices and norms in the digital landscape.  Telling the history of Copyright Act of 1976, the paper makes clear distinctions between the eras in which current laws were written and the age in which we currently operate.  Will such reform find it way into the queue of Congress' priorities?

The argument for why it should can be found in the full paper over SSRN, and on Pam's website you can find a host of her other writings and thoughts.