At 09:54 AM 01/20/2003 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:
It dwindles because the rate at which the copyright period is increasing
averages more than 1 year/year. Quite a number of works which had
been in the public domain fell out of it when the 20 year extension went
into effect.
The public domain *did* dwindle.
Did anything that had already become public domain cease to be public?
There were documents that were _going_ to become public domain soon
that will now stay copyrighted for another 20 years,
and one of the issues addressed by the Supremes in Eldred was
whether the grant of an extra 20 years of copyright monopoly to
documents that already had expiration dates assigned under the
old laws was appropriate, as distinguished from granting a
longer monopoly to new documents, but I thought it was established law
that if something once became public domain it stayed that way.
