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)

281 degree from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Yale University. He currently serves as chairman of the Intellectual Property Section of the American Association of Law Schools and is a member of the Copyright Society of the USA. He has served as an advisor to the Office of Technology Assessment and helped to prepare that body's 1992 report to Congress on computer software and intellectual property. Welcome, Professor Reichman. We have written statements from our four witnesses, which I ask unanimous consent to be a part of the record. I ask that you all summarize your statements in 10 minutes or less. All being lawyers, that's hard to do, I know. [Laughter.] I ask that the subcommittee hold their questions for all four witnesses until they've completed their oral presentations, and we'll begin with the testimony from Professor Belton. STATEMENT OF JOHN BELTON, PROFESSOR, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, ON BEHALF OF THE SOCIETY FOR CINEMA STUDIES Mr. Belton. Thank you, Chairman Moorhead. I guess I should say I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I can be briefer than my colleagues. I represent an organization of academics, the Society for Cinema Studies, which teaches film and television in colleges and universities around this country. First, I might begin with prefacing my testimony by suggesting that there is a very simple answer to the question of the day about perpetual copyright, and it can be done without increasing term limit. All you have to do is live forever. One of the points that I think that whole idea raises is the sort of conformity with other standards and terms, and so forth. And if you just think for a minute about the arbitrary terms that come with life-plus-50 or life-plus-70, you realize that cop5n-ight terms can be very, very short. Think of Buddy Holly, for example, as opposed to Irving Berlin, a man who died in his twenties, a man who's tried to live forever. And I think these need to be weighed when we talk about conformity in cop3nright law, that there really is no conformity of term in copjrright law. But I'm speaking as a lawyer, so I should stop that. What I'm going to talk about specifically is the proposed legislation as it relates to works-for-hire; in particular, motion picture and television works, and I have very little to say about protection for authors. The proposed legislation actually fails to distinguish between works made for hire and works protected by authors. It awards a 20-year extension to both works produced by authors and works made for hire. One of the reasons I think that the 20-year extension figure came up was that it would provide authors and their immediate heirs for two generations with extended copyright protection. Works-for-hire are made by corporations. Corporations have a life expectancy that is not determined by human longevity. There is, therefore, no need to increase the copyright term for works made for hire using the logic that's being used for works produced by flesh-and-blood authors. One of the — I guess the other issue that I think needs to be addressed when I'm talking about conformity is that appeals are