[Greg Anos]

Hitch,
Much of the confusion over copyright versus publishing rights on this forum are due to the nature of the history of copyright extension. It has not been the creators proper who have been continually lobbying for copyright extensions. The main money (and lobbying effort) has been by large corporations, who hold large portfolios of copyrights made as "work-for-hire", for which there is no copyright ascribed to the creators. (There may be negotiated contracts with the copyright holders for residuals, but they are not from copyright, per se, merely parts of the "work-for-hire" terms). For those copyright holders, there is no distinction between the publishing rights and the copyright. For work-for hire, they are one and the same. This has led to the "common person's" viewpoint that the are one and the same.

You downplay the importance of the "old copyrights" in your discussion, but they are solely the reason for copyright extensions since 1909. We are told to focus on Life + X here in the US, but these terms are meaningless for US copyrights. Nothing has fallen into the public domain under the Life + X terms, nor are any expected to in the future by the commenters on this forum. The only meaningful terms in the US copyright law, are the backward looking extension of pre -1978 copyright. This have been driven by Big Media Corporations, in order to continually maintain their large libraries of work-for-hire copyrights. Everything else is "collateral damage". Every extension, from the half-hearted joining of the Berne Convention in 1978, to the Sonny Bono Copyright extension act of 1998 (The Mickey Mouse Perservation Act in the vernacular) have made certain that overrides to Berne were made to preserve those works-for-hire.

Because of those overrides, an author, who died in 1924, and whose work(s) were published and copyrighted in 1923 or 1924, and were renewed under the 1909 act properly, will not go into the public domain until 2018, assuming, of course that another extension of the copyright act is not added to those pre-1978 copyrights. That means that works, in this example, that would have gone into the Public Domain in 1974 or 1975 under Berne's Life + 50 (actually quicker under US copyright law), or 1994 or 1995 under Life + 70, will not actually go into the Public Domain until Life + 94, at best. Whereas a work by the same author published in 1921 (1922 is a special situation) would have gone into the Public Domain in 1977.

There has only been one year that has fallen into the Public Domain since 1978, (1922) and that was because of a logjam in Congress that kept the extension from being implemeted on time. (It was to have been slipped in during the wee hours of the last day of the session, but the time ran out before it could be brought up for a final vote.)

Copyright is frozen in the US. You can bring up all the "poster children" dependent on extended copyright all you want, it doesn't stop the fact that works that were created under one copyright rule set, are being continually blocked from going into the Public Domain for no other reason than Corporations refusing to accept the concept of Public Domain, and they have the money to br - excuse me - lobby - suffcient politicians to get their way, no matter what happened to the public.