Copyright Strangulation

This is quite a stunning graph:

Recall that books published through 1922 are in the public domain in the US; those published since then are covered by copyright.

If this were a moving wall, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad: eventually, books would come out of copyright and be released in new editions. But Disney does keep going back and insisting that nothing can ever be returned to the Commons from which they so liberally drew, and Congress loves Disney; we might reasonably expect another copyright term extension act to keep the wall fairly rigid.