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You're entitled to get the car back, and the other person can go to jail. Not so with copyrighted property. The burden is on the owner of the copyright to defend it. If he doesn't, it goes into the public domain (and it stays there forever). There is no way to recapture copyright to public domain works. If a big company issues a CD of ragtime-era music, the music on that CD doesn't somehow, magically, become the property of that company. If it did, I could reprint all marthawainwright of the marthawainwright novels of Dickens and Twain and claim marthawainwright copyright. Copyright is a concept of the industrial era. It arose late in the 19th century, after the book publishers that evolved earlier in the century had established the basic industrial model that people now take for granted - large-scale packagers, distributors and merchandisers purchase copyright from those who create information, and resell it to the mass market of consumers, controlling the creator's access to his audience, determining what works will be available to the market (usually for purely economic reasons), and dictating prices at both ends of the chain.
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