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)

414 drance, the negative effects of this extension legislation on new authors, both large and small, but especially small, whom we count on to keep this export engineer rolling. Mr. Belton. If you — ^you were about to recognize me maybe? I think it might be impractical to try to redress the errors of a culture from this vantage point, but I think one of the things you could focus on is whether or not you want to extend copyright term for works made for hire because that would, then, at least put an end to whatever inequities may be part of that system, and that is a very minor change and it also does not violate conformity with your present agreement. Mr. CONYERS. Thank you. Mr. Reichman. What makes our provision the most generous in the world is that works for hire last 75 years. As I said earlier, the norm is 50. I would agree that there's no reason at all to change the current term of 75 years. I agree completely with Bill that if you are impressed by the testimony of people like Quincy Jones, the important thing is that artists, not publishers, get the money. And when people came in here this morning and said this is not a very complicated question, that was not true. This is one of the most complicated issues that I've looked at in a long time, and I specialize in very complicated issues. It is not simple. [Laughter.] It is not simple. And when people say that it's simple, there's usually a hidden motive for doing that. Second, be careful about trade balances. We in the United States have a tendency to try to rig international law for short-term advantages and then get hit over the head by the long-term disadvantages. I used to teach international law, and there are examples of this piled up all over. The developing countries used to do that too, but they learned to be more cautious. They extended their shorelines, the offshore rights, exclusive rights, by 200 miles, thinking, ah, that will really fix things, and then what did they find out? They can't exploit their own zones very well, and they can't reach distant waters; but developed countries can exploit their own 200mile zones and the most distant waters. So, when you start fooling with international law for short-term benefits, then you're locked in. Everybody's been thinking about the wonderful short-term advantages of the TRIPS Agreement; no one is worrying about national treatment and MFN, which are now universal norms. Cop)nnght law is a kind of lottery, and it's a wonderful kind of lottery because it doesn't limit the number of winners. If we have some winners, that doesn't preclude there being winners in Australia, winners in Malaysia, winners in Latin America, winners in Africa. And I have to tell you that the rate of innovation at the moment is about five times higher in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand than it is right here, and I have documented evidence of that. So I get very nervous when our trade representatives, captured temporarily by certain oligopolies, want us to believe that the market we see today is the world for all time. I recall that the United States, only a few decades ago, controlled 70 percent of the world market for general purpose machine tools. The United States is now a net importer of general purpose machine tools. It's an exporter of special purpose machine tools known as computer pro