Distributing public domain content is a solved problem. You can put it on a government website with a BitTorrent seed, whereupon it'll be mirrored to Wikimedia

Distributing public domain content is a solved problem. You can put it on a government website with a BitTorrent seed, whereupon it'll be mirrored to Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, and everywhere else. Archival & digitization is the actually expensive part. I will note that "who pays" is a problem even before the content hits the public domain. What you're arguing was specifically one of the arguments used to justify the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[0]. Unfortunately, copyright is the wrong tool for the job. It merely says that if you produce a work someone wants to buy, then they have to buy a copy of it from the person who made the work. The problem is, the vast majority of old works are not in any kind of demand. Congress and the EU made sure that copyright would vastly outlive the actual commercial lifespan of the work. So marginal[1] increases in term length do not result in marginal increases in preservation. Because nobody is going to pay for it regardless. In fact, nobody is even going to be aware that the work in question even exists. The way that archival works nowadays is that you preserve everything you can get your hands on. Because it's the common garbage that nobody cares about that is the most likely to be lost. Any market-based solution like copyright is likely to miss such works. [0] Derisively called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, due to Disney lobbying for it, even though it was primarily started by the EU wanting everyone to adopt Germany's copyright term lengths [1] In the economics sense. e.g. "on the margin, does adding one more year of copyright result in one more work preserved"