US Public Domain Expands, While 20-Year Pause for Canadian Public Domain Begins
blog.archive.org
blog.archive.org
And since 50+ year old works bring in negligible profit for all but a small handful of exceptional works, it's not even the case that the copyright extension is about squeezing out more profit from them.
What it's really about is reducing competition on an already oversaturated market, so new works don't have to compete with freely-available old ones.
If this is about ensuring new works in Canada don’t have to compete with freely-available older works, doesn’t that suggest that it will increase trade in new works?
After all, it's mutual benefit that economists tout as the motivation for increasing trade, not the siphoning of money from consumers to media oligopolies.
It's also a huge market inefficiency - how many millions, if not billions, are wasted on creating new works, when in many cases older works would satisfy consumer demand just as well? Oddly, economists have little to say on this - they only speak up against inefficiency when doing so aligns with corporate interests.