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)

283 so forth. "Little Women" was mentioned earlier. And we have Gillian Armstrong's recent version last year of "Little Women." But the real problem with the term extension in terms of the way to fix the public domain is that in 1976 the term was extended 19, 20 years, whatever it is. It's proposed that it be extended again, just as that term is about to run out. Will there be yet another proposal within 20 years when this term is about to run out? In other words, what kind of logic is driving this. I understand the desire of copyright holders is to extend their copyright protection in perpetuity, but, again, this necessarily must be balanced against the, what I would say, larger needs of culture, which has not been mentioned much here today; education, which has not been mentioned at all today. So that the financial rewards that come to creative artists, who are actually casted, unfortunately, in the role of people who want to make more money out of their works rather than people who are artists who are creative because they have to be. So I want to readdress this issue to suggest that this balance between financial rewards and our responsibility as citizens, the culture as a whole, must necessarily be regarded. One of the problems with granting extension of 20 years to motion pictures and television works is that the American film industry has been a notoriously poor custodian of its copyright materials. Most of you know that up until 1950 over 50 percent of all American films perished. We're talking about a term of extension that sort of begins in 1919 and goes to the forties or something. If you look at that period of silent films of the twenties, only 20 percent of all those films survived. This is because the studio said, "We have sound. These silent films are economically worthless to us. We will junk them," and that's, indeed, what happened. These films have deteriorated in studio vaults or been dumped in the Pacific Ocean. It's been the public archive, on the other hand, that has taken the initiative over the course of the copyright protection of actually funding — perhaps they shouldn't have funded with public funds — the preservation of some of these copyrighted works. It's only been in the last 10 years, with the advent of aftermarkets of video and cable, that the motion picture industry has taken a very, very active role in preserving its own assets. One of my concerns is preservation and access. I'm a member of the National Film Preservation Board. And although it's not appropriate to talk about this in the context of copyright, it seems to me that, if extended term is to be given to motion pictures and other audiovisual material, there ought to be some assurance that these materials would not suffer the experience that it had in the past; that it would be preserved, and that there would be reasonable access to it. As educators, our problem is reasonable access, and I have a whole document, anecdotal evidence of just how difficult it is to get reasonable access to copyrighted and uncopyrighted materials, which is in the record, but it is not trivial, the problems that are faced by educators in trying to pass on the culture of the moving image to our students. And I think that the extension of rights to copyright holders in this particular instance is not necessarily going to help us at all;