Notices by Alan (he/him) (drwex@toot.boston)

@JamesGleick At a bare minimum it vastly exacerbated the 'orphan works' problem in which the use and republication of many creations was made impossible because the original copyright holder could not be found. That has gone on for decades longer than it needed to and continues to this day. Thousands upon thousands of books are out of print, films are not shown, compositions are not played because their rights are unobtainable.

More directly, it led to a vast impoverishment of the public domain commons. It's that commons that contributed to the creation of massive numbers of works - including vast swathes of Disney's own archive. You're asking someone to point to what was missed and that's impossible, directly. We can simply point to all that got created in the past by drawing on the commons and then point out that if you starve that commons, as the CTEA did, you deprive every artist and every possible creator of that rich source material.

If that doesn't convince you, well, so be it.