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Plenty of courses get taught on literature recent enough that it is not yet in the public domain. Here's one: http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/david_foster_w

Plenty of courses get taught on literature recent enough that it is not yet in the public domain. Here's one: http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/david_foster_wallaces_1994_syllabus.html http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/david_foster_wallaces_199... So yes, Shakespeare would probably still be taught, though the plays would cost a bit more.

Retra 12y ago
Yes, but those are taught because they have a modern perspective which you won't get from Shakespeare. And it is hard to say that contemporary classics will last 300 years if you keep them locked under copy-write the whole time. My point is that a world with Shakespeare under perpetual copy-write is different enough from this world that it would be very difficult to predict whether or not it would retain its status as a teaching necessity. It could very well be the case that we would be teaching modern renditions of folk tales instead. Or that someone else would write Shakespeare-style archetypes in a more accessible format, and we'd use that instead. Everybody knows Shakespeare because everybody knows Shakespeare. Its hard to say exactly how much of that is undone by copy-write.