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Vanderbilt Law Review

Julie E. Cohen

First Page

1799

Abstract

Everyone agrees that the purpose of the copyright system is to promote progress.' At the same time, though, skepticism about the law's ability to define the substance of progress runs deep within copyright case law and theory. Legal decisionmakers and scholars have quite properly doubted their own ability to evaluate artistic or literary merit, and have worried that efforts to do so would result in an inappropriately elitist and conservative standard. In addition, there is room for substantial debate about whether the metaphor of forward motion leaves out other important measures of what "progress" is or might be. This agnosticism about prospects for value-neutrality has led copyright law and scholarship to eschew debates about the sub- stance of progress in favor of debates about rule structures for ena- bling progress. Steeped in jurisprudential and scientific traditions that prize process and method, both in themselves and as proxies for value-neutral decisionmaking, we have decided that even if we cannot say what progress is, we can say something about the system of rules and entitlements that is most likely to promote it. This strategy, though, assumes that the substance of progress is independent of the legal structure designed to produce it. If it is not--if entitlement structures play a role in determining the kinds of new works that will be produced-then we cannot escape making decisions about substance, and it is folly to pretend otherwise.

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