Copyright term, film labeling, and film preservation legislation : hearings before the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, first session, on H.R. 989, H.R. 1248, and H.R. 1734 ... June 1 and July 13, 1995 (1996)

76 penditure, to promote them. The competition is drastic today, and few songs ever become popular standards. If you are going to terminate the rights after 25 years, you are going to put the legitimate publishers out of business, because they must live on those few popular standards. It is the income from those popular standards he receives that places him in a position where he can exploit the new compositions. Such a provision would mean the death knell of our industry. I ask, why this radical curtailment of existing rights, instead of participation in the extension of such rights? Today, I ask the same question. Why extend the duration of copyright protection without an equitable extension of the statutory Hmit on the duration of transfers? Following Mr. Abeles's appeal, the preliminary draft of the act was amended to provide for termination of transfers after 35 years, and, in fact, that is now codified in section 203. Congress recognized, then, that the extended term warranted an extended period in which publishers could recoup their investments from the creative process and the promotion of the works. I would like to illustrate with a little chart to show under the 1909 act what the relative duration of transfers was in terms of years under the bifurcated term and what it is under the 1976 act, and under the legislation being proposed here. The chart shows what would happen in terms of a balance between the publishers' rights if they were left unamended the way it is listed in the bill now. What we are trying to bring to your attention is that the publisher's interest is what we are trying to get across here and if we don't do something to change what has been put forward here, there will be a significant imbalance of the rights that exit right now. What Mr. Abeles noted more than 30 years ago is no less true today. That many works and the investments in those works never show a profit. Given the rich variety of music available to the American public, few think about it, but for every song that becomes a hit, hundreds, many more, go unnoticed. From a business standpoint, duration of the publisher's opportunity to exploit a work and recover his or her initial investment is crucial. While this is true for all categories of music, it is particularly true for serious works — classical works and musical theater. According to the Music Publishers' Association, an organization whose constituency is primarily involved with the production of sheet music, and that endorses NMPA's points of view, the rising costs of production makes investment in serious copyrighted material a very speculative undertaking. MPA has stated that in the United States, printing costs alone for a symphonic work average $15,000. Printing costs for a full operatic work range from $100,000 to $150,000. The markets for recovering such an investment are small and have been harmed greatly by increasingly sophisticated photocop3dng technology. The problems confronting publishers of such works is compounded because much serious music gains little public exposure or acceptance until many years after its creation. For example, the famous Barber composition, "Adagio for Strings," experienced only modest economic success following its debut in 1939. It became popular 25 years later, however, when the piece of music was used in connection with the funeral of President Kennedy.