I was already thinking of the same solution Christian.Tismer proposed before I reached his post. namedtuples seem cleaner if they naturally act as singletons, so (potentially whether or not pickling is involved) declaring a namedtuple with the same name and fields twice returns the same class. Removes the need to deal with module qualified names, and if pickle can be made to support it, the namedtuple class itself could be pickled uniquely in such a way that it could be recreated by someone else who didn't even have a local definition of the namedtuple, the module that defines it, etc.