The U.S. Copyright Act provides a little known and virtually unused exception specifically for libraries and archives. It allows them to reproduce and distribute a work in the last twenty years of its copyright, if there is no normal commercial exploitation of the work and there is no copy of the work available at a reasonable price. This exception resides in Section 108(h) of the U.S. Copyright Act. To use this exception, libraries and archives necessarily have to be able to

Copyright (and patents, too) are protected for "limited Times", thanks to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution.