Even with more recent works, many copyright owners haven't uploaded their work to be online (digital, searchable, and shareable).This practice hinders academia also with journals insisting only to sell content and not share it.
If everyone agreed to a standard with a micro-payment protocol that would let anyone with content immediately expose it to sell it independent of platform or site, "everything a click away" may be in reach, but this protocol would have to be open. As long as walled gardens are competing, the gardens are all that is a click away, and since the gardens are selective with their content (as a consequence of being for-profit) all the old stuff will continue to have no place to stay. So we have a handful of copyright holders give their stuff away for free, but everything else disappears into the offline abyss.
The future I envision will be "composer + protocol ==> consumer" and will have no middlemen.
If everyone agreed to a standard with a micro-payment protocol that would let anyone with content immediately expose it to sell it independent of platform or site, "everything a click away" may be in reach, but this protocol would have to be open. As long as walled gardens are competing, the gardens are all that is a click away, and since the gardens are selective with their content (as a consequence of being for-profit) all the old stuff will continue to have no place to stay. So we have a handful of copyright holders give their stuff away for free, but everything else disappears into the offline abyss.
The future I envision will be "composer + protocol ==> consumer" and will have no middlemen.