[JackFr]

> There is almost no cash value to an article one day later, yet we completely impoverish the public domain for its sake.

If there is no value to an article one day later, it’s literally impossible that restricting it impoverishes anyone.

Copyright law is messed up, but demanding access to something by asserting it’s worthless makes no sense.

[Banana699]

>If there is no value to an article one day later, it’s literally impossible that restricting it impoverishes anyone.

You have mistakenly generalized "cash value" to "value" without reason. I find a ton of value reading old media, because it allows one to "play the historian", you get a unique and magical ability to experience an era just like its natives have done, except not with their outlook on life or assumptions. It's the closest you can get to traveling to a far foreign country.

This is value, but not cash value. Releasing this media impoverishes no one (in terms of cash value) but massively impoverishes people like me (in the sense of value).

>Copyright law is messed up,

10^grahams_number amen to that, it's bloody ridiculous to withhold something decades after its creator died and their family is now in the 5th generation and probably don't know the thing ever existed.

Copyrights, patents and intellectual property are a blight upon the earth, a massive bug in civilization's conception of ideas and knowledge that no one is willing to report.

[bryanrasmussen]

>This is value, but not cash value.

I agree that then copyright on the news should expire a lot sooner, but really if people (as a general category) find value in something they (as a general rule) will pay some amount to have it. It may not be a great amount, and you may not be one of the people who will pay for it despite valuing it (many people who value music won't pay for it, but there are obviously people who do value it and will pay).

I am not arguing that there should be copyright on this media just that what the parent commenter said is correct, you can't claim that it holds some form of value without also admitting that someone will pay (another form of value) for it.

In point of fact now that I think of it I have some old hardbound police gazette collections that are republished sometime in the last 20 years from 100+ years ago. I paid for those.

[Retric]

Economically numbers close enough to zero are zero. Basically every method of value extraction has overhead so something can both be valued and have no economic value.

[WalterBright]

> every method of value extraction has overhead so something can both be valued and have no economic value

Right. Which is why I don't bother selling on ebay or amazon, it isn't worth the time, postage, or trip to the post office. It just goes to the thrift store, as they have a business model that enables them to eke out a profit on such items.

[bryanrasmussen]

yet books that compile publications from previous centuries are published and bought but evidently the ledgers are not debited or credited for the parties to these transactions. Basically if a method of value extraction has so much overhead that it has no economic value I would expect that method to disappear, thus when methods of value extraction are still in use I think that someone has managed to derive economic value from that method - perhaps a very paltry economic value in comparison to some of the companies we discuss here quite frequently - but still some value.