I know Library of Congress has a newspaper database. But does anyone know if newspapers are covered by mandatory deposit in the US? Many European countries archive all national newspapers, printed or digital, so they won't be lost for posterity if deleted by their publisher.
To me it seems unreasonable to require publishers to keep an immutable record. Shouldn't be forced by law to keep up your blog posts. National Libraries and legal deposit were literally made to solve this issue.
The local newspaper here recently shut down. They had close to 100 years of archives, went to the dump. They tried to give them to the library, to the local university, to anyone. No takers.
Again I don't know the scope of US mandatory deposit. But in the countries such as the UK, the Scandinavian countries, or Germany tall issues of such a newspaper would already be in the archive of the national library, in two copies.
Basically, as I understand it, there is none. If you want to collect copyright infringement damages, you have to register for copyright, pay, and deposit a copy. Otherwise you have a copyright on creation and don't need to deposit anything. The vast majority of created works are not deposited anywhere.
The US has a very weak legal deposit scheme compared to e.g. the UK. IIRC, legal deposit is only required where the author applies for copyright registration, so it’s extremely unlikely that a newspaper would be subject to the legal deposit scheme.
To me it seems unreasonable to require publishers to keep an immutable record. Shouldn't be forced by law to keep up your blog posts. National Libraries and legal deposit were literally made to solve this issue.