This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 24, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Once upon a time, the industry known as big content could simply ask Congress to extend copyrights and the wish was granted.

That probably won't happen this year.

That's according to Tim Lee at Ars Technica.

He says the big players in copyright aren't doing much of anything to prevent lots of works from falling into the public domain next year.

We spoke last week.

Most people, your age and my age, the idea of something that had been owned, a copyright,

slipping into the public domain, it's almost something that we can't really picture.

The only things that are in the public domain are super old.

Yeah, that's right.

Nothing, you haven't had a class of works from a year fall into the public

domain in 40 years.

Until the 1970s, this would happen every year, every year something that was about 50 years old

would fall into the public domain and you get a whole

new crop of a full year's worth of works that previously have been under copyright and now

is free for anybody to use for any purpose they want.

And in 1976 Congress passed legislation adding 19 years to the term of copyright, which essentially

froze the line between the public domain and works in copyright at

1923. And then in 1998, just months before works were scheduled to

start following the public domain again, Congress did the same thing again. They

retroactively added 20 years to the copyrights of older copyrighted works and as a result

...