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)

228 ers should be the beneficiary of that, and so they v/in the extra 20 years and they certainly, with regard to Europe and other countries that go to the longer term, have the ability to recoup that money that they're really entitled to, because it's their works that are being used. On the loser side, it's less clear. I believe that there's a public benefit in this legislation. However, you have to be midful of the fact that it is very difficult to find copyright owners in some cases and that there maybe legitimate and beneficial uses of those works. In my statement we pointed out that Canada, Japan, and a number of countries have specific provisions dealing with situations where the copyright owner cannot be located, and I think it's time that this country looked at this issue. And I do feel very strongly, that the works that haven't been published in the 17 years since the effective date of the current copyright law should enter the public domain in 2003. The likelihood of their being published seems to be very small and the benefit to be gained by the American public is large. I could give a list of the things that are just sitting in the Library of Congress that fall into this category. Mr. Hoke. And what will happen exactly with those? Ms. Peters. The Library has the ability to make them available to the public. We could either make them widely available through the Internet or could put them into class rooms. I have in my testimony an example where we've cleared an entire collection except the letters, but the letters are absolutely critical to the collection. One of the collections that we're going to be working on next year, but with the help of the family, is the works of Leonard Bernstein. The family would like to see the collection disseminate to the American public. We're going to have to work out the various necessary clearances of rights. I think you're going to hear from a lot of people — and we certainly did that many people use the public domain to spur new creations, and that much of the material that authors use is material that's in the public domain. Mr. Hoke. What does the word "use" mean there? Ms. Peters. "Use" means to basically take a work and create a new version of that work. I was reading on the plane the other day about "Little Women." "Little Women" is in the public domain. A key point of the article was that now there are many, many versions of "Little Women," and some of the versions actually have Beth living because Americans don't like young women to die. When a work is under copyright, you can't have that happen. You have to have permission of the copyright owner to make a new version of the work. Once it's in the public domain, people can take it and change it. So to the extent that there are people who basically create new derivative works, that Mr. Hoke. And they don't have to — but they don't have to give an attribution to the derivation. They don't have to make a Ms. Peters. Well, there's actually a question about moral rights that I'm not going to get into. The issue is whether or not you have to give credit to authors. The United States is a member of the Berne Convention which requires that we provide a right of attribution at least during the author's life and 50 years after that. I