Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [. . . ] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.
Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.