[headkase]

I am a proponent of the Public Domain. I believe it is the base the creative aspects of our society draws from. Regulating the public domain is copyright law. The contract that states that ideas may be protected for a limited time while giving a party the exclusive right to distribute a work. Over the years the terms of this contract have been continually extended. In the United States copyright now stands at life of the author plus seventy years. It was originally fourteen years. The contract that copyright law represents is that ideas being truth are not property even in expression. After the period of protection expires and the creator has had a reasonable time to make a profit on their work it enters the public domain. The public domain provides a rich mosaic of expression, ideas, and culture for future generations to draw from when creating new works. With the terms so extended this benefit to society has been almost completely negated. I will never see in my lifetime a work created in my childhood enter the public domain. I will never see another original work based on its setting and characters. The culture and diversity the totality of such works being restricted represents a theft of culture. People focus on what is, not what is missing. If these works had been allowed to enter the public domain in an actual reasonable amount of time then others could have remixed them and also sold these new works themselves. This is the secondary market. Copyright extensions have destroyed this. By the time works do expire under current terms they will be irrelevant. Their times will have passed and no one will be interested in them at all. This represents a black-hole that works have been consigned to. It is theft from all of us. If these works in a functioning public domain were not locked up effectively forever from an individual's point of view they could have become the raw material for works that cannot be imagined. As this could and should have has been denied us. We are all poorer for it and because it didn't even happen we don't know the extent of it. I believe we need reform to the time copyright lengths are permitted to be.