Jamie “Public Domain” Boyle sez, “When Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic, Fahrenheit 451 was published, it was scheduled to enter the public domain this month — January 1, 2010. But then we changed the law. And Bradbury's firemen look like pikers compared to the cultural conflagration that ensued. The works may not be physically destroyed — although many of them are; disappearing, disintegrating, or simply getting lost in the vastly long period of copyright to which we have relegated them. But for the vast majority of works and the vast majority of citizens who do not have access to one of our great libraries, they are gone as thoroughly as if we had piled up the culture of the 20th century and simply set fire to it; and all this right at the moment when we could have used the Internet vastly to expand the scope of cultural access. Bradbury's firemen at least set fire to their own culture out of deep ideological commitment, vile though it may have been. We have set fire to our cultural record for no reason.”

Remember folks, thanks to 11 copyright term extensions in the past 40-some years, more than 98% of all works in copyright are “orphaned” — still in copyright, but no one knows to whom they belong.

via Burning the library in slow motion: how copyright extension has banished millions of books to the scrapheap of history Boing Boing.