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 to amend the statute to place open-content licenses outside the reach of the Copyright Act’s termination clauses.

A. The Public Benefit of Open-Content Licenses
In recent years, a vast body of content has been created and distributed under licenses that grant unspecified members of the public rights that, by statute, ordinarily belong to the copyright holder alone. Before discussing the specifics of a few such licenses, it is useful to identify some important commonalities that most open-content licenses share.

First, and most fundamentally, all open-content licenses authorize otherwise unlawful conduct: that is, they expressly permit users of the licensed works to perform actions that would otherwise infringe the licensor’s copyright. Absent authorization (or other legal excuse such as fair or de minimis use), reproducing, distributing, or modifying a work infringes the author’s copyright. Open-content licenses make such otherwise infringing activities lawful and thereby facilitate uses of works that federal law would ordinarily prohibit.

Second, all the open-content licenses considered herein are universally available: the works are offered to all on equivalent terms without the need for individualized bargaining. This is not, of course, to deny the possibility of dual licensing: a prospective licensee dissatisfied with some of the conditions of an open-content license may negotiate with the work’s author for a license on different terms. Absent dual licensing, however, a licensee who