Having rejected the most commonly prescribed solution to the problems created by the United Kingdom's current approach to protecting users, in this final chapter we outline our vision for reform. As we have indicated at a number of points, we believe that, despite its unpromising history, the Information Society Directive provides a good starting point from which to build a fairer system of exceptions. Although there are aspects of the Information Society Directive that are less than ideal, using the Directive as our starting point has the key advantage that the political obstacles to reform are much less formidable – any other model would almost certainly require amendment or repeal of the Directive in order to be implemented. Our vision of reform has been arranged around four principles. These are: (1) reform must lead to a more flexible system; (2) any new approach must create a workable system; (3) a new system should be restyled as a system of users' rights; (4) in the future there needs to be far more public participation. We begin by explaining and justifying the adoption of these principles before turning to consider what a system of rights for users based around the Information Society Directive might look like.

A flexible system

One principle that we believe should drive reform is that the resulting system must be more flexible than the existing one, which is characterised by an exhaustive list of closely defined exceptions.