A major focus in the problems with the Life+70 or even Life+50 copyright systems is not even in literal preservation of old works--it's cultural preservation.
Once a work of art completely fades from the public consciousness, once nobody cares about it for artistic or historical or monetary reasons, then it becomes so much harder to keep that work circulating. We can see that even just in the last 100 years, where once-classic franchises have completely fallen by the wayside.
Raggedy Ann has nearly disappeared from the public consciousness, and many of its works in the public domain are currently not preserved. Nobody cares at all about
Andy Hardy or
Secret Agent X-9anymore.
And for a more modern example, internet culture changes so quickly that copyright can't even dream of keeping up. Nearly all of my favorite sprite comics from the mid-00s are offline by now. Half the blogs of Tumblr and Livejournal have been deleted, Smackjeeves was taken down, and Vine has disappeared. Nobody is preserving this stuff because it doesn't "feel" important, but in 50 years people will be lamenting it greatly, because not only will it probably be lost, but even if it's not, they can't legally distribute it for another 120 years because the creators haven't even died yet.
Cultural preservation is about keeping the memory and context of a work of art alive and vibrant. It's of course not just about art! Everything in a culture has the same risk, although copyright isn't a barrier at least. Small town festivals, treasured family recipes, local languages... They all require significant cultural preservation to last, and once it hits a certain impossible-to-measure threshold, it'll never truly come back.
First Language - The Race to Save Cherokee - YouTube
Some of it's really weighty, like making sure that an indigenous culture doesn't totally disappear. Some of it's extremely silly, like chronicling an oral history of the making of a viral Tiktok. But for most of it we just never know what's going to last and what's going to become extremely relevant decades down the line. We never know what series will
become a tax write-off and suddenly disappear.
It's obvious nobody realized Oswald the Lucky Rabbit would become an early animation icon, or else we wouldn't have lost so many of his early shorts. The fact that it took 95 years for any Oswald shorts to become available to us means that, by the time the average Youtuber could upload the shorts no problem, it was decades too late.
I have absolutely no idea how to fix the copyright system to encourage both art preservation and cultural preservation. It's such a complex issue. But I do know that our current online system of relying on large nonprofit entities with potentially shaky finances (Wikimedia, Gutenberg, most libraries), or data banks with tenuous legality (Internet Archive), or outright illegal shadow libraries, is not going to hold together in the long-term. Something needs to be done sooner or later, especially for work being created now.
