ABSTRACT
The most important reason copyright reform is infeasible is that the US Congress has a lot of other vexing challenges to deal with in the next decade, including the Iraq war, global warming, immigration reform, and tax policy reform. A copyright reform project focused on revision of the 1976 Act would require a considerable investment of effort from many people, would cost a good deal of money, and would bring to the surface many highly contentious issues, such as those that manifested themselves in the legislative struggles that led to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. This chapter discusses some preliminary thoughts about what a model copyright law might include and how one might go about getting rid of some of the clutter in the existing statute. A model copyright law should achieve and offer some guidance about how competing interests should be balanced, perhaps through a series of comments on the model law or principles.
