An example of what could be

I've commented before about the harmful effect of the US's current copyright law, and the intellectually impoverishing practice of giving away yet more years of legally-protected monopoly every time the intellectual-property-owning industries ask for it.

The Michigan County History project is one example of what dedicated scholarly and historical groups can accomplish when not hobbled by perpetual copyright bans. It supplies searchable online full text of nearly two hundred county histories published before 1926. Most of these books are long out of print and hard to find, and supplying their text online today is hardly a financial hardship to the original author or publisher, even if the original publishing company still exists. There are a great many books and other materials published after 1926 which are similarly out of print, but which cannot be legally made available in the same fashion because the dead hand of perpetually-extensible copyright laws, repeatedly extended for the enrichment of the owners of a relatively small number of perennially-popular works, forbids it.

JSTOR and other academic databases frequently use what they call a "moving wall", a contractual prohibition on coverage of the most recent three to five years worth of certain journals. This parallels the original intent of US copyright law: to protect a creators' and publishers' right to profit from new work, but make past works available on a regular and continuing basis as time goes by. The IP barons who profit from perpetual monopoly on a few perpetually popular works wish to fix that wall forever at 1926, with no new material ever again entering the public domain. But it's long past time for the wall to start moving again.