One may sympathize with the general sentiment about over-protection and the particular example of the Term Directive. The subtext of this passage is, however, more contentious. It echoes a common plaint heard when British intellectual property lawyers talk shop among themselves. The charge boils down to 1. The UK's common-law based copyright law is becoming eclipsed by, or subsumed mass(or mess) of European Directives based on civilian theories of copyright; and 2. This process is, on the whole, a Bad Thing The remainder of this paper is largely devoted to examining these Propositions (6) Proposition No. 2 may conveniently be considered first. It rests on a number of assumptions of arying degrees of plausibility, namely That before the European directives appeared, UK copyright law had attained, or was on the way to attaining, a sort of legal nirvana, and that therefore the law should not have been, and nould not in the future be, deflected from this state or trajectory The claim is, of course, a delusion. The suggestion that UK copyright law had reached its apogee during Victoria's reign is refuted by the Victorians themselves. The pronouncement of the royal Commission on Copyright of 1897 is typical. The Commissioners said of the law of copyright, then found in 14 statutes stretching from 1735 to 1875. that it was wholly destitute of any sort of arrangement, incomplete, often obscure, and even when it intelligible upon long study, it is in many parts so ill-expressed that no one who does not give such study to it can expect to understand it. (7) The Copyright Act 1911(UK) supposedly cured all that, but the wheel seems now to have come circle. The metamorphosis of the 51 sections of the Copyright Act 1956(UK) into some 270 equivalent sections in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988(UK)(CDPA,) produced the following comment from the editors of Copinger Skone James on Copyright, in words depressingly reminiscent of the 1897 Royal Commissioners [t is perhaps unfortunate that a branch of the law, which was already complex enough, will now, with the coming into force of the 1988 Act, become even more complex. Apart from the size of the Act, its change of format and its new provisions, it does not help that some comparatively simple matters have been made more difficult.. The 1988 Act... may, therefore, well prove to be a nightmare for copyright users and a minefield for copyright practitioners ( 8) Significantly, this comment came at a time when only a single European Directive, on semiconductor topographies(1986), had intruded on UK copyright laws pristine purity So, at worst, the amendments inspired by the Directives may have added more nightmares and minefields to the law, but the sorry state of the initial CDPa cannot be attributed to any new exogenous influences. Indeed, the trend of UK copyright law over the course of the last century toOne may sympathize with the general sentiment about over-protection and the particular example of the Term Directive. The subtext of this passage is, however, more contentious. It echoes a common plaint heard when British intellectual property lawyers talk shop among themselves. The charge boils down to: 1. The UK's common-law based copyright law is becoming eclipsed by, or subsumed under, a mass (or mess) of European Directives based on civilian theories of copyright; and 2. This process is, on the whole, a Bad Thing. The remainder of this paper is largely devoted to examining these Propositions.(6) II Proposition No. 2 may conveniently be considered first. It rests on a number of assumptions of varying degrees of plausibility, namely: • That before the European directives appeared, UK copyright law had attained, or was on the way to attaining, a sort of legal nirvana; and that therefore the law should not have been, and should not in the future be, deflected from this state or trajectory. The claim is, of course, a delusion. The suggestion that UK copyright law had reached its apogee during Victoria's reign is refuted by the Victorians themselves. The pronouncement of the Royal Commission on Copyright of 1897 is typical. The Commissioners said of the law of copyright, then found in 14 statutes stretching from 1735 to 1875, that it was: wholly destitute of any sort of arrangement, incomplete, often obscure, and even when it is intelligible upon long study, it is in many parts so ill-expressed that no one who does not give such study to it can expect to understand it.(7) The Copyright Act 1911 (UK) supposedly cured all that, but the wheel seems now to have come full circle. The metamorphosis of the 51 sections of the Copyright Act 1956 (UK) into some 270 equivalent sections in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (UK) ('CDPA') produced the following comment from the editors of Copinger & Skone James on Copyright, in words depressingly reminiscent of the 1897 Royal Commissioners: [I]t is perhaps unfortunate that a branch of the law, which was already complex enough, will now, with the coming into force of the 1988 Act, become even more complex. Apart from the size of the Act, its change of format and its new provisions, it does not help that some comparatively simple matters have been made more difficult. . . . The 1988 Act . . . may, therefore, well prove to be a nightmare for copyright users and a minefield for copyright practitioners.(8) Significantly, this comment came at a time when only a single European Directive, on semiconductor topographies (1986), had intruded on UK copyright law's pristine purity. So, at worst, the amendments inspired by the Directives may have added more nightmares and minefields to the law, but the sorry state of the initial CDPA cannot be attributed to any new exogenous influences. Indeed, the trend of UK copyright law over the course of the last century to