[bentley]

I doubt it played a very big role. Consider: the last general copyright extension in the US was the CTEA in 1998. Back then, the movie and music industries were among the biggest players in the copyright space. Since 1998, though, Silicon Valley companies (most obviously Google) have become powerhouses with lots of money and lots of incentive to fight future copyright extensions.

[8note]

Do silicon valley companies still have a big incentive to fight copyright extension?

The public domain and copyright expiry is one more set of requirements for SV code to have to implement and support. It's way easier if the owner stays for ever, and that there is a single owner

[mod50ack]

Yes. They have every reason to want it. The more raw material isn't covered by copyright, the more they can feed into anything.

And that's not even counting the relevance of organizations like the Internet Archive, which was not nearly as meaningful in 1998.

> The public domain and copyright expiry is one more set of requirements for SV code to have to implement and support. It's way easier if the owner stays for ever, and that there is a single owner

And this makes no sense. Applications are not required to recognize public domain content and make it unrestricted when copyright expires. Having it remain under ownership forever doesn't make anything easier. And, in fact, copyrights having a single, simple owner is just... not the case. So to whatever extent there is a need to keep track of owners, copyright expiration only makes things easier (because if a work is in the public domain, you can no longer screw it up).