This much, and no more

In 1984 times were tough. I was 11, in the 6th grade. It was hard for me because I was a high needs child. It was tough for my teacher because the district had no money, and being a special ed teacher, she had access to a very small portion of no money. I don't remember much about the 6th grade. I can remember that my teacher was very good and very creative- and I remember An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. She handed out photo copies of the story. It lit a fire in my imagination and for a long time afterward I nurtured a love of the twist ending. I tried to write my own twist endings stories, but being a kid, they were fairly obvious. I read Saki and O'henry. I started to fall in love with literature, a love which has never left me.

You never know what will spark that passion in a child's mind. Sometimes it's Shakespeare, sometimes it's Twain. Teachers and parents often throw a huge body of ideas at children and hope that something sticks. Very often it never happens. I still meet adults who've never read anything that really excited them- I don't believe this is their shortcoming, simply that they never found the right story.

My 6th grade teacher was able to save me from that fate because of a curious part of copyright law called public domain. The public domain is that point at which no one owns the work anymore, and no one can collect money or restrict the use of a work as the copyright holder. That means people can hand it out for free after making copies of it, or post it on a website, or whatever. People can create works based on it, like my own predictable twist ending stories, without asking permission. Whole new bodies of work can be created- like West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet, and Romeo and Juliet from Greco/Roman mythology. Every year of my childhood the public domain grew by a year's worth of literature. We lived in an expanding universe.

Things have changed since '84. Times aren't so tough for me, and I am carrying my first child- a daughter. I am excited and hopeful of giving her a better life than I had. This is one of the qualities I like most about human beings, that every generation wants to give a little more to their children than they had. We don't always succeed, but it's a life work's worth of trying.

Copyright law has changed as well since '84. The public domain, at least for now, has stopped growing, a year's worth for every year. I will still be able to offer the same public domain to my daughter that I grew up with. I hope she will stumble across her own Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and draw on the impressions and stories of of her peers that have stumbled across their own as well. But I will not be able to give her anything more than I had, and by the time the public domain begins to grow again her childhood will be over. Like the rest of us, she'll be a little too busy to read as much as she used to. We're sending a clear message to the generation being born right now: you get as much as we did, and no more. That's not really good enough for me. I want to give my daughter more, even if it's just a year's worth of literature, every year.

This work is released under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. To view a copy of this license, visit http://web.resource.org/cc/PublicDomain or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

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