I think the challenge is that the Copyright Board was conceived as a replacement for market negotiations. You have a monopoly. You can't have a market negotiation, so you bring the buyer and the seller together in a regulated price. There really wasn't any room for public interest intervenors in what was really a buyer-to-seller transaction, because the board wasn't supposed to do policy. It was just an economic rate-setting tribunal.
I think we've seen that the board now does policy. It is the tribunal first instance for a lot of important copyright questions.
I actually agree with David. I think there is a role for more input from a broader range of groups on issues of public policy. I don't think you necessarily want to have groups weighing in on every price-setting mechanism—on whether the price per square foot for background music is fair or unfair—but where the board's interpreting copyright law for the first time, other perspectives are useful.