* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in
the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and
hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know.
This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into
signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides
and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary
agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books
they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long
to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?

* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement,
especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of
$150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their
representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the
ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information
before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge.
This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong
side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse:
publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them
from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to
prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in
the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the
opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming
potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting
material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts
because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a
work carries such a terrible price.

* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court
hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works