The Disney Corporation just won Eldred v. Ashcroft, which means that the trend continues: nothing published in my lifetime will ever enter the public domain in the USA.
Knowledge is alive – and, like all living things, it eventually dies. DNA left alone in a jar will fall apart, paper left on a shelf will moulder and crumble, CD-Rs and videotapes become unreadable, stone monuments erode. Engineers, who like to believe that every problem can be solved by the correct object, might imagine engraving the secrets of our culture on plates of platinum-iridium and burying them in a great vault. But even this might not work. There are a lot of 3000-year-old tablets written in Cretan Linear A, but who is to read them? The language is extinct.
Knowledge can live forever, but only if it is properly cared for. The Bible has lived for thousands of years because, in each generation, there have been people who cared for it. People move the Bible from parchment to paper to brain to disk to parchment again; they clean up after its misspellings and teach it new languages when the old ones fade away. Other people perform Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic – and these are still alive, a hundred years after their contemporaries withered and died.
If you want to save a book, song, poem, joke, language, or art form, there’s only one thing to do. Copy it. Spread it around.
By attaching a permanent legal and financial burden to the act of copying, we drain the life from our own culture.
(For example, it turns out that my ideas are similar to the ones in this Hugo-winning short story which I hadn’t read until three minutes ago (Thanks, Cory D!). Wouldn’t it suck if Spider Robinson could sue me for copying his ideas on my lame-ass blog? Wouldn’t it suck if Spider Robinson could be sued for turning the ideas from my lame-ass blog into a classic short story?)