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)

221 Mr. MOORHEAD [presiding]. Well, thank you all very much. I'm sorry I couldn't be here for all of your testimony, but I've got two markups going at the same time. I can't be every place at once. Mr. CONYERS. Commissioner Lehman was exceedingly brief this morning. [Laughter.] I wanted you to know that. Mr. MooRHEAD. Does the ranking minority member of the full committee have questions of this panel? Mr. CONYERS. I don't. I was going to ask Ms. Peters to give us some ideas about what the legislative suggestions she made would look like, but, as usual, Bruce Lehman's talked me out of whether we really want to make those changes or not. You know, what — this is a really big business going on here, and I'm still provincial enough to wonder about the little guys and how we can continue to expand their interests and their protection. I mean, even though we are proud of our culture and support all the music and the movies and the record-playing, and so forth, some of the creators have received short shrift in the past, and we're trying to bring our society out of that. And to the extent that while we're looking at these measures that we can keep remembering some of the jazz musicians that were overlooked in a different era and other contributors, that would be my concern. And if any of you have any comments about that, I'd be delighted to entertain that. Ms. Peters. I'd like to respond on the point that I made, which is that the way that the law was put into effect, which Mr. Lehman pointed out, was if the work was unpublished, it was protected perpetually, and those works came under the Federal law on January 1, 1978. The law gave them a 25-year term of protection, and if they were published in that 25 years, 25 years more. What I'm talking about are photographs, letters, manuscripts from 1780, 1790, 1820 which have not been published in the 17 years since 1978, where a number of institutions have been preparing them for distribution to the American public. We're not talking about any of the works that have commercial life and where a publisher has taken them and published them. Where those works have been published, we support the additional term. So we're really only talking about the works that are sitting, that have seen no use, and in the 17 years since the passage of the law nobody has published them; I don't think that much music is in this category. I think it's mostly photographs and letters, the kinds of things that historical societies basically collect. Mr. CoNYERS. Commissioner, does that accommodate some of your reservations on that point? Mr. Lehman. Well, I don't think that this is an earthshatteringly significant subject, but I wanted to point out to the committee that, until 1978, these works, even if they may have been created in 1820, enjoyed perpetual copyright. There is an argument that one of the incentives to disseminating works to the public is to provide some kind of exclusivity to a publisher who is able to obtain those rights. So I think there are two sides to the matter. The question is: would some kind of eleemosynary organization be encouraged to disseminate works by virtue of not having to clear any rights, and 23-267 96-8