I am the primary copyright activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization. I witness takedown abuse every day. My case is not an anomaly and is, in fact, pretty tame: this was almost certainly a greedy mistake by somebody who knows there are unlikely to be negative consequences. It’s what’s known as copyfraud, but it’s not somebody deliberately targeting my upload and misusing the copyright system as the handiest tool to take it down. (We see plenty of that, too.)

The real goofy bit is that before I started at EFF, I worked at SoundCloud. I actually uploaded this Apollo 13 clip, along with sounds from Apollo 11 and others, as part of a project to attract more historic and archival audio and really celebrate the public domain as a rich source of sounds.

But it’s true, our public domain has taken a beating. Through acts of Congress and unfortunate outcomes in Supreme Court cases, the steady expansion of our cultural commons has been largely replaced by stagnation.

There are, of course, a few ways a work can end up in the public domain. Works of the US government are immediately and always free of copyright restrictions. Since that category includes recordings by NASA, my upload is a simple case. Beyond that, the public domain was once the default in the United States: unless you put a proper notice with a copyright sign and the year, and sent in a registration form and fee, your essay or film or recording or picture would never carry copyright restrictions at all.

Even if works did get copyright status, the terms once granted would eventually expire. The result was a rich pool of common resources.

Over the last forty years or so that has changed. For one thing, nearly all works are granted copyright restrictions automatically. As soon as a minimally original work of authorship is recorded—“fixed in a tangible medium,” is how the law puts it—it’s covered by copyright. On top of that, a 1998 law extended copyright terms for 20 years retroactively, meaning that no copyright on a published work has expired in the US for some 16 years. We’ve suffered a long drought, marked solemnly each January 1st—Public Domain Day—by thinking about what we could have had.

And with that quantitative shift, there’s been a qualitative one, too. In decades past, the cultural treasures of each generation would be the common property of the next. Now we are limited to cultural works that date back nearly a full century; it’s not our fathers’ and mothers’ culture, it’s our distant ancestors’.

With that declining relevance, and the rising uncertainty caused by innocent mistakes and copyfraud, the public domain starts to look less like an inviting common meadow and more like a foreboding possible minefield. So here and there, in dribs and drabs, the public domain gets edited out of the picture.