Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/30/posterity-preserved.html
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So we are expecting legislation in just under 7 months to stop this?
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without tedious research.”
I’m tedious research’n right now.
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I hope Fox and Friends doesn’t talk about this because Trumpy will kill it.
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Either Congress will get around to fucking this up or I’m going to get diagnosed with cancer this year because I’ve been quite certain I’d die before the greedy fucks let anything back into the public domain.
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shh… Don’t Jinx it.
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Shh! Don’t talk about it and maybe Congress will be too distracted with elections and Trump to get around to it.
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Let’s hope this time that the congressman responsible for the next copyright extension skis into a tree before submitting the bill for a vote.
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Except that Disney will make some movies from this and then claim it’s their copyright.
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No hurry. SCOTUS has declared that even if works slip into the public domain, Congress has the power to claw them back. There doesn’t seem to be any limit on how far back they can go, either.
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Hooray for brutal partisan deadlock?
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So glad you put that “research’n” in there! 
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Dibs on Venus of Willendorf copyright
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Will Shetterly’s “The People Who Owned the Bible”
Required reading here, folks 
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One of these days a post title will be so long, arcane, and convoluted that a “right now” will simply disappear into it unnoticed.
But I’m not holding my breath.
PS: I expected “I’m getting a second infusion right now.”
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The situation is even more grotesque than you describe.
About 30 years ago, I wanted to use a fairly lengthy quotation from Lenny Bruce. I ran an authenticated search via the Library of Congress, which reported that the copyright belonged to Lenny’s widow. I tracked her down, contacted her, and she very nicely and immediately replied that she did not hold the copyright, and that the publisher (Grove, as I recall) held it. I contacted them, and they told me that they did not hold the copyright, and that she did. So, I ended up not using the material, which was in legal limbo, for fear of being sued by some copyright troll.
One other issue not addressed in the post is that the extension passed Congress only after Disney contributed $600,000 to the Republican Party’s congressional campaign fund. (The copyright on Mickey was due to expire shortly.) It was a good investment. Disney likely made hundreds of millions from the extension.
The losers were the public, who were denied access to tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of works.
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Well that’s a real turn up for the books! 
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