We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
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The grant of copyright in current law already incorporates a balancing of these costs against the benefits to the public from protection. It reflects a judgment that the positive results of giving copyright owners exclusive rights outweigh the economic and availability costs. The question is whether this balance shifts during the final 20 years of an extended life plus 70 term. In other words, does the marginal increased cost to the public of waiting an additional 20 years for free access outweigh the marginal increased incentive to authors to create new works? This is not, as those opposing extension characterize it, a conflict between the interest of the public in a richer public domain and the economic interests of copyright owners; rather, it is a question of whether 20 more years of protection, which temporarily deprives the public domain of existing works, will in the long run lead to a richer public domain containing a greater number of works .
The extent of each type of cost to the public may vary depending on the nature of the work involved. As to the economic cost, it is not clear that the public always pays significantly less for works that have fallen into the public domain. Many of the costs of production will be the same regardless of the work's copyright status, and prices for copyrighted works are restrained by competition in the marketplace from other available works, including those in the public domain.
The economic cost will also be affected by the question of access. Copyright owners often own and control access to the original physical copies of their works, such as original artwork, master tapes or master prints. As a result, they may be able to require higher payment even if low quality copies are available from competing distributors. While a cheap reproduction will be an adequate substitute for some types of works, it will not be for others. Movies, for example, are markedly less enjoyable when the images and sounds are of poor fidelity.
As to the availability cost, the dimensions of the problem seem small. Copyright owners are generally interested in exploiting their works for money. Despite isolated anecdotes, situations where authors or their families seek to deny public access to works are unusual. They will be even less frequent during the extended term, more than 50 years after the author's death; strong personal feelings about a work's contents tend to diminish over time.
Censorship problems should be extremely rare in the case of motion pictures. Most movies are commercial vehicles, created as works made for hire. Thus, the copyright owners will not be censorious or privacy-conscious family members. As business entities, movie studios are unlikely to hold back potentially profitable works from public view.