"globalization of the market". To regulate the copyright of
digital editions in the wake of the relevant WIPO international
treaties, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was
ratified in October 1998 in the United States, and the European
Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) was ratified in May 2001 by
the European Commission.

According to Michael Hart, and Project Gutenberg CEO Greg
Newby, "as of January 2009, the total number of separate public
domain books in the world is between 20 and 30 million, and
that 5 million are already on the internet, and we expect
another million per year from now until all the easy-to-find
books are done. 10 million or so will be done before people
start to think about the facts telling them the rate cannot
continue to double as they come up to the point of already
having done half. New copyrights lasting virtually for ever in
the U.S. will bring the growth process to a screeching halt
when The Mickey Mouse copyright laws, literally, copyright laws
on Mickey Mouse, and Winnie-the-Pooh, etc., stop all current
copyright from expiring for the forseeable future."

= Copyleft and Creative Commons

The term "copyleft" was invented in 1984 by Richard Stallman, a
computer scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology), who launched the GNU project to develop a complete
Unix-like operating system called the GNU system.

As explained on the GNU website: "Copyleft is a general method
for making a program or other work free, and requiring all
modified and extended versions of the program to be free as
well. (...) Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the
software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom
to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every
user has freedom. (...) Copyleft is a way of using of the
copyright on the program. It doesn't mean abandoning the
copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible.
The word 'left' in 'copyleft' is not a reference to the verb
'to leave' -- only to the direction which is the inverse of
'right'. (...) The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) is a
form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or
other document to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy
and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either
commercially or non commercially."

Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing,
a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on
it