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)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

673 authors (if not first published in the U S ) that have fallen into the public domain as a result of failure to fulfill copyright formalities The benefits of the existing laws are much lower for US authors and US -origin works. US (and all other non-EU-) origin works, as well as works created by US nationals (first published in a non-EU country) are excluded fi'om the benefits of the EC Term Directive, and, under the Directive, are mandatorily subject to rule of the shorter term. The benefits of the Phil Collins case, basing its ruling on the principle of nondiscrimination against any EU national contained in the Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community will, by definition, not benefit US nationals. The U R A.A., too, specifically excludes restoration of works first published in the US, as well as works by U.S. authors (unless such works are co-authored by at least one national or domiciliary of a non-U.S. "eligible country"). The only legislation that would directly benefit US authors on a nondiscriminatory basis is the proposed Copyright Term Extension Act, which would, if adopted, result in increased protection for US authors, result in a net qualitative and quantitative/economic benefit to the US public, and achieve the worthy goal of harmonization with the EU. Finally, the US Acts have deficiencies which detriment EU an US authors equally: neither the U R A A. nor the proposed US Copyright Term Extension Act revive pre1978 works that fell into the public domain as a result of lapse of the anomalous U.S. pre1978 term of duration based on the date of publication or registration of a work. Despite these shortcomings, the recent laws affecting copyright duration collectively represent a major increase in European and US copyright protection that must be heeded when entering into licensing transactions, conducting acquisition due diligence and valuations, and preparing derivative and collective works based on pre-existing (including previously public-domain) works The US Extension Act, should be adopted to facilitate the global exploitation of copyright-based products by harmonizing the US terms with the new EU terms 31