What should copyright protect?

This project aims to imagine what copyright law might look like if it were designed anew, from scratch. In Chapter 1, the editors ask what it would look like if we could ‘design a law to encourage creativity, remunerate and support creators, and increase the size of cultural markets to ensure broad access to new knowledge and creativity’.¹ These goals seem to me to reflect the ‘preponderance of individual interests’ approach to the public interest that the editors have described.² After all, virtually every member of society is a creator – for example, in the age of cell phones, almost