The Internet Archive, the Prelinger Archives and Project Gutenberg are submitting a friend-of-the-court brief in the Eldred-vs.-Ashcroft fight over copyright extension.

Via a Word document on the Archive site, here’s just one of the powerful arguments that these groups are making:

“In the year 1930, 10,027 books were published in the United States. In 2001, all but 174 of these titles are out of print. While a copy or two may exist in a library or a used bookstore, the copyright holders cannot or do not make these titles available to the public. But for the CTEA, digital archives could inexpensively make the other 9,853 books published in 1930 available to the reading public starting in 2005. Yet because of the CTEA and the likelihood of future term extensions, we must continue to wait, perhaps eternally, while works disappear and opportunities vanish.”

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