Surveying The Public Domain - 1A - 0 views
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Mathieu Plourde on 11 Jan 19"…because of term extensions, we've had to wait almost a century before copyrighted works enter the public domain (in 2019, works from 1923 are finally freely available). Under current copyright terms - life plus 70 years for natural authors, and 95 years from publication for works of corporate authorship - you're unlikely to see any works created in your lifetime enter the public domain. This imposes great (and in many cases unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, it imposes costs on our collective culture. Even for the works that are still commercially available, the shrinking public domain increases costs to citizens and limits creative reuse. But at least those works are available. Unfortunately, much of our cultural heritage, perhaps the majority of the culture of the last 80 years, consists of the orphan works described above-works that have no identifiable or locatable copyright holder. Though no one is benefiting from the copyright, they are nevertheless presumptively off limits."