> Let me challenge you by with one problem with the whole copyright system. Right now there are many works that were produced decades ago, are still under copyright, but cannot be bought at all because its not economically valuable for the copyright owner to produce a few dozen/hundred copies a year.
AFAIK in the music world, people are usually pretty happy to license out the rights to do a new vinyl/tape release. Seen it happen plenty of times recently (I've bought a few of them!). Get in touch with rights holder, ask how much they're willing to license it out for if we were to do a run on this, see what they say.
But they can say no if they want to, of course.
Then again, I buy weird stuff. So...
> Society is worse off because the above is true for possibly millions of works, and while not having access to one individual work is not that concerning, in the bulk it is. A significant part of the cultural heritage of our society has been lost because of the intersection of copyright law and economics.
Millions seems like a high number. Especially considering it's so cheap to put things up for sale on digital stores like iTunes.
Yeah, this is an issue. There are so many barely known 80s LPs I'd love a repress of, but such is life really. If it isn't going to make someone somewhere some money then it just won't happen.
> Not to mention most of these copyrighted works at this point are held by Big Media companies and not the actual creators of the work.
This is not usually the case, at least for music.
Creators of a work will negotiate with their publishers for a share on both the Performing and Mechanical Right. Publishers usually get a bigger chunk of the mechanical right, whereas creators get a bigger chunk of the performing right.
The royalty shares on all the Beatles songs are SUPER-COMPLICATED. There's so many different entities. And 90% of them are to do with the estate of the members of the Beatles. Not big media companies.
So I'm not sure what you mean by "big media" completely own the rights to the works instead of the creators, because 99% of the time that's not true.