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)

411 copyright in 1920 sell it to the public at 1995 rates and the author's not going to be able to share in that? I don't know why there should be a subsidy. Without a right to renegotiate, authors are paying a subsidy to people who bought it long ago. I don't know why it's wrong to let an author and his family, the people whom this bill is supposed to protect, sit down and negotiate for what it is worth now. You're giving the 20 years now. You didn't give it 75 years ago. It's a question of fairness. Mr. MOORHEAD. I'm of the opinion — and I know that the direction things go, if you sell your services with all you create for a certain amount, say in todays market a million dollars, you might only be able to get a half a million if you had all kinds of strings tied to that sell. Presumably, they've contracted for it, but they made a deal. They made a contract. They made a sale. Aiid they've probably been paid more than they would have been paid if there were strings on it. And, yet, if the Government come back and puts the strings on it, they have certainly interfered with the private contract arrangement. Mr. Patry. I don't know how you can say there's interference by the Government if the contract is being honored for every single day that it was negotiated, and what you're talking about is giving something that neither party expected, anticipated, bargained for, or paid for. Mr. MoORHEAD. We have all kinds of Government changes made due to zoning of property of all kinds. If the Grovemment makes rules after that, that would make it more expensive or make it cheaper; that doesn't alter the terms of the contract. And that's something that was never anticipated, but it still happened. I wanted to ask Mr. Belton something. You were referring — ^you know, in the early days of the motion pictures — I grew up in the neighborhood. So I watched them to a great extent come along. The early motion picture companies were just little companies really, a lot of them. They didn't have a lot of money for modem-day storing of motion pictures, and so forth, like we have now. There's no question about it; a lot of them were lost. But if you would go through the Disney libraries and Sony's and Warner Brothers' and others out there now, you would find that they are very meticulously being cared for, and the opportunity of them being discarded or lost just isn't really there any longer. Things have changed by the years, and I think that film preservation is wonderful and I have supported it all along. It's nice for a Grovernment control agency or support agency to have those available for people that want to use them or see them at a given time, or at least know that they will be there for years to come. But it's very difficult to criticize those early-day studios for having lost some of those things that we wish they would Mr. Belton. Well, it certainly is the nature of the medium itself. We would expect to find books published in the same period in libraries, but it's because of the unstable nature of motion picture film and the nature of the business — ^it was quite a different business from publishing — ^that these films don't survive. And the ones that do tend to belong the major six to eight studios who have survived along with them. So you're right, there is a great problem in these small companies that have disappeared that have made