>If there is no value to an article one day later, it’s literally impossible that restricting it impoverishes anyone.
You have mistakenly generalized "cash value" to "value" without reason. I find a ton of value reading old media, because it allows one to "play the historian", you get a unique and magical ability to experience an era just like its natives have done, except not with their outlook on life or assumptions. It's the closest you can get to traveling to a far foreign country.
This is value, but not cash value. Releasing this media impoverishes no one (in terms of cash value) but massively impoverishes people like me (in the sense of value).
>Copyright law is messed up,
10^grahams_number amen to that, it's bloody ridiculous to withhold something decades after its creator died and their family is now in the 5th generation and probably don't know the thing ever existed.
Copyrights, patents and intellectual property are a blight upon the earth, a massive bug in civilization's conception of ideas and knowledge that no one is willing to report.
