Some people here are supporting keeping works from 1923 on in copyright. Before 2019, Congress will surely take up legislation to prevent works from 1923 from

Some people here are supporting keeping works from 1923 on in copyright. Before 2019, Congress will surely take up legislation to prevent works from 1923 from entering the public domain, and this legislation will surely pass. The argument made in support of this is false though. I am politically realistic about this, and from a perspective of political realism have no problem with with Disney pushing the 1923 goalposts for its works out to 2039. Or for the publishers of the Great Gatsby to push their copyright from 2021 to 2041. And so on. I realize this is political reality, as do most in this fight. However, there are many works from 1923 sitting on library shelves where absolutely no one would re-register its copyright. They are orphaned, gathering dust, the paper deteriorating. It would be nice if orphaned, forgotten works no one will ever bother to re-register would enter the public domain as the laws currently allows. Project Gutenberg can digitize them, private publishers could even start reprinting them. This is what the Public Domain Enhancement Act would have allowed for. Hollywood and the MPAA fought it and killed it. History tells us that many works of Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras etc. have been lost. The same thing is happening now. Old books are sitting on library shelves, deteriorating. These orphaned works will no one will ever re-register will not be scanned, OCR'd and proofread by Project Gutenberg, will not be distributed by print or electronically by independent publishers. This is where the argument lies. Some proponents of the extension here are talking about Disney and author compensation and so forth (although the youngest author I can conceive of would be an 18-year-old publishing in the last year, 1923 - and thus would be 114 when copyright goes out in 2019 - and that would be the absolute youngest author. I should note only four people currently living are verified to be 114 or over). All of us know with 100% certainty that Congress will pass a law by 2019 keeping Disney works, The Great Gatsby etc. in copyright. This is political reality, and is impossible to stop. What we want is for orphaned works which no one would ever re-register to become public domain - as they are currently supposed to. At this point all talk of author compensation etc. disappears. Hollywood will keep making money on licensing The Great Gatsby, we will prevent orphaned works from becoming the lost Aristotle works, the lost Euclid works of the future. Hollywood is fighting this, and will probably win, although if there was a mass movement against it, we could win orphaned works. Because at the end of the day Hollywood is not making licensing orphaned works. But it shows how many of the arguments made here in support of extension are bogus. Because the fight is over orphaned works. We know the Mickey Mouse and Great Gatsby works will be kept by Hollywood. We just want abandoned, orphaned works. And if we organize and fight to get those, we just might get them into the public domain and preserve them.