Blog: More than 50,000 books, films and songs are now in the public domain

“Films, for example, newsreels, documentaries have literally rotted in their cans,” she said. “They’ve disintegrated because preservationists have been waiting for their copyrights to expire before they can legally digitize them. So we’ve actually lost a huge swath of culture from the ’20s, from the ’30s because of the Copyright Term Extension [Act].”