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Originally Posted by tubemonkey
I don't see it as detrimental. The public didn't create these works, so they have no right to them.
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Of course you can see it that way, but I think these few paragraphs quoted from the Duke University site sum up the benefits and drawbacks of current situation fairly well if you want to read them. Spoiler-texted so you can skip a the chunk o'text if you don't.
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Copyright gives creators — authors, musicians, filmmakers, photographers — exclusive rights over their works for a limited time. The copyright encourages the creators to create and the publishers to distribute — that’s a very good thing.
But when the copyright ends, the work enters the public domain — to join the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart, the books of Dickens — the material of our collective culture. That’s a good thing too!
It's the second part of the copyright bargain; the limited period of exclusive rights ends and the work enters the realm of free culture.
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Even better, people can legally build on what came before.
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In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing.
What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture.
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For the works that are still commercially available, the shrinking public domain increases costs to citizens and limits creative reuse. But at least those works are available.
Unfortunately, much of our cultural heritage, perhaps the majority of the culture of the last 80 years, consists of orphan works.
They are not sold anywhere and they have no identifiable copyright holder. Though no one is benefiting from the copyright, they are unavailable: it is illegal to copy, redistribute, or publicly perform them.
Does all this mean that copyright is a bad system? Of course not. Copyright serves an important purpose in facilitating the creation and distribution of creative works.
The basic principles of our copyright system are sound.
But studies like the Gowers Review commissioned by the UK government, empirical comparisons of the availability of copyrighted works and public domain works and recent economic studies of the effects of copyright protection all suggest that lengthy copyright extensions impose costs that far outweigh their benefits.
In fact, economists who have modeled the ideal copyright term have uniformly suggested that it should be far shorter than it is right now.
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The full set of points they present on their website is a lot more eloquent.