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The tremendous growth in communications media has substantially lengthened the commercial life of a great many works. A short term is panicularly discriminatory against serious works of music, literature, and an, whose value may not be recognized until after many years.
Although limitations on the term of copyright are obviously necessary, too shon a term harms the author without giving any substantial benefit to the public. The public frequently pays the same for works in the public domain as it does for copyrighted works, and the only result is a commercial windfall to certain users at the author's expense. In some cases the lack of copyright protection actually restrains dissemination of the work, siiKe publishers and other users cannot risk investing in the work unless assured of exclusive rights.
A system based on the life of die author would go a long way toward clearing up the conAision and uncertainty involved in the vague concept of "publication," and would provide a much simpler, clearer method for computing the term. The death of the audior is a definite, determinable event, and it would be the only date that a potential user would have to worry about All of a particular author's works, including successive revisions of thent, would fall into the public domain at the same time, thus avoiding the present problems of determining a multitude of publication dates and of distinguishing "old' and "new" matter in later editions. The bill answers the problems of determining when relatively obscure authors died, by establishing a registry of death dates and a system of presumptions.
One of the worst features of the present copyright law is the provision for renewal of copyright A substantial burden and expense, this unclear and highly technical requirement results in incalculable amounts of unproductive work. In a number of cases it is the ^ause of inadvertent and unjust loss of copyright Under a life-plus-50 system the renewal device would be inappropriate and unnecessary.
Under the preemption provisions of section 30 1 and the single Federal system they would establish, authors will be giving up perpetual, unlimited exclusive common law rights in their unpublished works, including works that have been widely disseminated by means other than
dtrr\duniioa.loc
July 11. 1995 10