Preliminary Thoughts on a Copyright Reform Project

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