Totally Off-topic!

> Here, I believe legislators and judges were fully briefed on most of copyright law's shortcomings and accepted them as a tradeoff, so in a sense they intended them to exist.

Sorry for the OT post, but this made me LOL and all my coworkers are looking at me right now.

Disclaimer: I work at a state legislative house, and for the last fifteen years I have been married to a district attorney.

Laws are like programs... but the "machine" that will interpret those programs are the lawyers, attorneys, juries, judges, and justices. And each machine interpret the program as they damn well please. And what we call "The Law" is actually some kind of "mean value" of the many runnings of the program (i. e., the program self-modifies each time it is "run"). And for a single execution of the program (a "lawsuit"), the result always depend on when and where the program is being run.

So, no: most probably nobody has briefed nobody on those shortcomings, and probably nobody even saw they existed.