I am reading jessica Litman's book, Digital Copyright, for the first time and am currently in the chapters on the legislative history of copyright law. Bismarck's comment about making laws and sausages is particularly to the point for this part of the story: fortunately, I already know I don't like the Digital Millenium Copyright Sausage.

I think that the "Commons" that some of the speakers were proposing to champion could be a way of providing something the absence of which is noted as a defect of the current process by Litman: representatives of the public interest, the principle the authors of the original US copyright clause gave as a motivation for explicitly enabling intellectual property rights in the US Constituion.