One seldom-mentioned aspect of copyright - for better or worse - is that it helps to keep old works (especially popular ones) off the shelves. If anyone could

One seldom-mentioned aspect of copyright - for better or worse - is that it helps to keep old works (especially popular ones) off the shelves. If anyone could distribute old works, at lower or no cost, they'd be strong competition for new works (with living creators, publishing staff, and servers to pay). Agreed that 'current state' is excessive. It's a shame that long out-of-print works (which are direct evidence of little or no commercial value to authors/publishers) have not become freely available since digitization came along. (Paying $35 for a digital copy of an ancient, but important science paper, for example.) OOP-status is pretty damned easy to verify today.