This comment was in reply to a now-deleted comment which ended with the statement: "The bigger problem is figuring out how to curate all of this which is more widely published than every before. Also, it's not crazy to think that today's copyright laws see some major revisions in the next few decades. The Internet has changed everything since just 1980 or so, and these are old laws that need reworking."
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Unfortunately I'm not sure I can feel the same optimism. Copyright law has long been beholden to corporate interests. For them, it's only fine if it keeps getting expanded indefinitely. The more restrictive the terms, the more likely that others will have to license their works and the more they can bludgeon any offenders.
Your view is really tied to the present day, but what about all these works that aren't available on computers that need to be desperately digitized? I think we already have a natural curation mechanism: something popular and important gets reproduced in some way; it gets quoted, adapted, tweaked. Those are the works that need to be prioritized, but in doing so we might miss out on undiscovered gems or things whose importance will only be apparent in hindsight. Also, storage is cheap nowadays, we can easily just keep everything, index it, and let others sift through it later. (one example is the Internet Archive, we won't know what role these stored websites could play in a few decades like the Geocities archive)
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Unfortunately I'm not sure I can feel the same optimism. Copyright law has long been beholden to corporate interests. For them, it's only fine if it keeps getting expanded indefinitely. The more restrictive the terms, the more likely that others will have to license their works and the more they can bludgeon any offenders.
Your view is really tied to the present day, but what about all these works that aren't available on computers that need to be desperately digitized? I think we already have a natural curation mechanism: something popular and important gets reproduced in some way; it gets quoted, adapted, tweaked. Those are the works that need to be prioritized, but in doing so we might miss out on undiscovered gems or things whose importance will only be apparent in hindsight. Also, storage is cheap nowadays, we can easily just keep everything, index it, and let others sift through it later. (one example is the Internet Archive, we won't know what role these stored websites could play in a few decades like the Geocities archive)