> The British Library keeps to a ‘safe date’ when determining when a newspaper can be considered to be entirely out-of-copyright, which is 140 years after the date of publication. It's depressing that copyright has been extended so far it's now longer then any single individual's possible lifetime.
There is almost no cash value to an article one day later, yet we completely impoverish the public domain for its sake. Not only are creators of valuable works is usually pretty distant from direct ownership anyway, there's no possible way for them to profit directly from this work. The only way a spotify-like deal works is because copyright ownership is conglomerated.
IMO, public (especially free-as-in-beer) access to newspaper archives could be pretty liberally justified on fair use grounds.