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Most people assume copyright protection lasts a reasonable amount of time before creative works become free to use. But the actual timeline has been stretched, extended, and lobbied into a system that can keep works locked up for more than a century — and one famous cartoon character has become the unlikely symbol of how corporate interests reshaped a law that was never meant to work this way.
The world map hanging in your classroom, office, and weather app makes Greenland appear larger than Africa, even though Africa could fit Greenland inside it fourteen times. This isn't a mistake — it's the result of using 16th-century sailing instructions as modern geography.
The image of Columbus bravely sailing west while superstitious scholars warned he'd fall off the edge of the world is one of the most vivid stories in American history education. It's also almost entirely fiction — and the man who invented it wasn't a historian. He was the author of 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.'
Before Reddit became the front page of the internet, Digg was the place where the web's most interesting content lived and died by the vote. Here's the wild story of how one of the internet's most influential platforms imploded, handed its crown to a competitor, and kept trying to come back.