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Mourning Announcement

The Supreme Court has upheld the 20 year extension of copyright which was enacted as law by Congress as the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998. The Court decided that the law was not a violation of Constitutional rights.

The law is a grievous limitation on the availability of huge quantities of material. Many published works from the early part of the twentieth century have not been available for a very long time, and it's not worth the cost to publishers today to track down the copyright holders in order to arrange republication. No one is making money off of those works, not the creators and not the publishers. When the copyrights expire then these works will be publishable again, for a charge or for free, but that day is firmly twenty years farther into the future than it ought to be.

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