So, here’s an interesting fact. Most published works are currently out of print and may never be printed again.
This is due to the fact that copyrights don’t expire until long after an author dies. This effectively orphans the vast majority (75% by most counts) of all published works. They are works for which the copyright has not not yet expired, but they are no longer in print. They also can’t be re-printed because the copyright owner has died and cannot authorize additional printing. Of the remaining 25% of the books out there, only 10% are in print and only 15% are in the public domain.
Why should we care about this? Well, mostly because these published works tell our story. They represent the sum knowledge of our cultural history.
In a similar vein, the British Library has launched an effort to archive the nearly 8 million websites in the .uk domain. Unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions, fewer than one percent of those sites will actually be archived at the current rate.
What can these sites possibly tell future generations about us that’s worth knowing?
Again, you could ask why we should care about those 8 million websites which probably mostly represent blogs that were created and then abandoned a few months after creation. The problem is that we don’t know now what is valuable and what isn’t. Its impossible to know right now what bits of knowledge will be useful for posterity.
Current copyright laws are a mess.
The owners of much of the printed material out there simply can’t be easily found. It’s based on an analog system. There is no registry of copyright ownership so I can’t figure out who to ask for permission to reprint something. We can’t agree on what fair use of copyrighted material means. We never envisioned the potential of being able to actually index the entire set of all human creations when current law was written.
Without careful consideration of the effects of current copyright laws, we could unintentionally create a new dark age.
Because the majority of all works cannot be currently archived or reprinted, we are in real danger of huge portions of the historical record of the information age being lost forever. We are the only creatures in the known universe we who have culture. We are the only ones who can record our thoughts and allow future generations to learn from them. It would be a shame to lose the very thing that defines us because we’re too lazy or too greedy to fix our broken copyright laws.
