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)

226 Mrs. SCHROEDER. And let me say, Ms. Peters, it's very nice to have you with your voice back. Ms, Peters. With my voice back. Thank you very much. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Absolutely. Commissioner Lehman, you said that the U.S. copyright-based industry and the public could benefit even more if we harmonized our copyright laws in further areas. Would you like to provide a list for the record or could you tick them off, or what other additional harmonizations should we consider? Mr. Lehman. I think in previous testimony before the committee I've indicated some of the areas. For instance, at the present time, the United States has a law that governs sound recordings that is not compatible with most of the rest of the world, and in particular, the European Union. Now the legislation that is pending before this the subcommittee, that I believe you and the chairman are sponsors of, does move us in that direction, but it only moves us part of the way there. So that continues to be a problem area. We also have differences in rental rights between the United States and our foreign trading partners. At this point I wouldn't want to propose changing that, but we should understand that the international negotiations in this area will probably only bear so many differences in the system. If we're going to retain anomalies in U.S. copyright law that currently exist, to the extent that we can find areas of common agreement with our trading partners, it makes it easier for us to come to that agreement that we all seek. One of the areas that will probably be coming to your attention that we are discussing with Europe right now, is the protection of noncopyrightable database. The European Commission is moving to promulgate a new directive on noncopyrightable data base. Noncopyrightable data bases are very important collections of data, particularly those that might be in a computer, that don't meet the test of authorship. In our own law we had a famous Supreme Court case, the Feist case, which very much narrowed the scope of copyright protection for such extremely valuable commercial works. These works will be very valuable on the global information superhighway. Europe has really taken the lead in this area, I think, it is rare for Europe to be more proactive than we are in trying to address that problem. That's an area I would look to where we might wish to take a look at their directive and consider harmonization in the same way we do here. So if there are areas where we can move in their direction, then it makes it easier for them to move in our direction or to accommodate some of the remaining anomalies that will be very hard to remove in U.S. law for an extended period of time. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Ms. Peters, you said you had concerns for libraries and educational institutions and their ability to carry out preservation and access, and so forth. Do you have some language or an3^hing that could help us with those concerns? Ms. Peters. We would certainly be — we'd like to try to do that for you. We're really not talking about any work that is commercially available. If it's commercially available, it's not an issue in a library. The American public has access to it. And the older the work is, the more difficult it is to secure permission to use it. So