Arkie, I don't need much encouragement to wax lyrical on the subject of the public domain.

Still, the Mudcat is probably the last place where people need to reminded of the importance of copyright expiration. Without the public domain, the Digital Tradition couldn't exist.

According to one source, a typical fee for reprinting a short poem in an anthology is fifty dollars. The digital tradition contains over 7000 titles. If every one of them were under copyright, and their incorporation into the DT cost $50, that would amount to a clearance fee of $350,000.00!

Maybe song-lyrics are billed at a lower rate than lyrics that have pretensions to being poems. But even if every title cost only a dollar to include, the total would still come to seven thousand dollars. That is before a single item of computer hardware or software has been purchased.

T.