Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria - The Atlantic

"Copyright terms have been radically extended in this country largely to keep pace with Europe, where the standard has long been that copyrights last for the life of the author plus 50 years. But the European idea, 'It’s based on natural law as opposed to positive law,' Lateef Mtima, a copyright scholar at Howard University Law School, said. 'Their whole thought process is coming out of France and Hugo and those guys that like, you know, ‘My work is my enfant,' he said, 'and the state has absolutely no right to do anything with it—kind of a Lockean point of view.' As the world has flattened, copyright laws have converged, lest one country be at a disadvantage by freeing its intellectual products for exploitation by the others. And so the American idea of using copyright primarily as a vehicle, per the constitution, 'to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,' not to protect authors, has eroded to the point where today we’ve locked up nearly every book published after 1923.

'The greatest tragedy is we are still exactly where we were on the orphan works question. That stuff is just sitting out there gathering dust and decaying in physical libraries, and with very limited exceptions,' Mtima said, 'nobody can use them. So everybody has lost and no one has won.'"