Fox News ran story a couple weeks ago about clubs and organizations dedicated to characters and stories ranging from Sherlock Holmes to Alice in Wonderland to The Wizard of Oz.
I know a little bit about such obsessive fandom since I’m almost finished posting electronic versions of all of the public domain Wizard of Oz books to my site, including a nice search form.
One of the interesting things about such fandom is it contradicts an argument made by copyright holders who want copyrights that do not have meaningful expiration dates (yes, they may expire eventually, but if it is not for another 150 years, then it is essentially meaningless IMO). An argument offered in favor of such long copyright terms is that without them there is no incentive to preserve copyrighted material. Once the copyright runs out on books like The Wizard of Oz or Alice In Wonderland or the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, then the books themselves run the risk of being lost forever because nobody has a financial interest in preserving them.
In reality, of course, the opposite is true. Obscure books that are in the public domain are, in fact, much easier to find than are obscure books that are still technically copyrighted.
For The Wizard of Oz or the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, there are hundreds and hundreds of sites online where the full text of these books can be found — and since the copyright has expired, freely copied (as I have done). Were The Wizard of Oz still copyrighted, it would probably not be online at all — in fact, many of the authorized Oz books written after L. Frank Baum’s death are not available online at all to my knowledge.
In fact there are thousands and thousands of books written in the early part of the 20th century that haven’t been published or sold in decades that are not available online precisely because they are technically still copyrighted even if it is by now all but impossible to determine who the rights holder is. The 1998 extension to the copyright act all but guaranteed that those books will likely not be available online until at least 2015 or so (and, by then, copyright holders will inevitably be asking for additional extensions).
The purpose of the copyright was to grant limited monopolies to authors in order to encourage the production of books and other works. Unfortunately, over the past couple centuries the idea that such monopolies should be limited has largely been thrown out the window.