alt Hacker News> works by people who died in 1955
70 years. After death.
The rules have to change. 70 years is way too long.
Replies
Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown.
>70 years is way too long.
Objectively, why? It's in our lifetimes, I'd say it's just about right.
Thankfully this is already happening thanks to the glorious AI - revolution. AI crawlers just ignore copyright - and any other rules and laws. ;-)
I was actually extremely surprised that Disney didn't bribe congress and stop Mickey Mouse from ending up in the public domain.