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  arose only after the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976, however, and it seems impossible that Congress could have intended, in 1976, to squelch the commons-based peer production phenomenon that would later arise. The risks that the statute’s termination provisions pose to open-content projects are unintended consequences, not conscious purposes, of the enacted text. Updating the statute to eliminate those unintended consequences would be conceptually valuable insofar as it would recognize, in positive law, the changes in the baseline assumption of proprietary production that have occurred since 1976.

Comprehensive copyright reform—a top-to-bottom statutory rewrite of the sort Congress is presently debating for the Patent Act —is surely not in the cards at present for political reasons. Although Professor Pamela Samuelson has launched a worthwhile project aimed at sketching the broad contours of a future model copyright law, even she concedes that the effort is not presently politically feasible. The existing copyright regime supports concentrated, profitable, and politically influential industries, and Congress perceives the existing structure of intellectual property law as defining an area of American competitive advantage in global trade. Sweeping