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)

302 and diaries from the founding fathers, for example~and constitute a vital source of original material for historians, biographers, and other scholars. Obviously, the normal copyright incentive to creative authorship is not involved here. This is simply an incentive to current owners of copyrights in very old works to find the works and publish them so that they will be accessible to everyone. By the year 2003 we will already have afforded the very distant descendants of the authors of these works 25 years of protection, plus the possibility of 50 years of protection if they find and publish the works. Twenty-five years is enough time for these owners to accomplish the ministerial tasks. These unpublished works should be allowed to go into the public domain in 2003, so that others will then have an incentive to find and publish them. Finally, even as to such of these works that are published prior to 2003, we can think of no argument, whether founded in natural law or otherwise, to support extending their term of protection until 2047. Fifty years of copyright protection for such old works, in favor of people who have no creative relationship with the works at all, is more than enough. Support for Two Generations of Descendants It is also argued that the copyright protection period was initially designed to provide a source of income to two generations of descendants of creative authors. Given the longer life spans of today, the argimient goes, a longer term is necessary to achieve this goal. Far from requiring longer copyright terms to compensate for longer life expectancies, these actuarial changes could be an argument for keeping the current term of life + 50, or perhaps even reducing it, because the longer life expectancy of the author automatically brings about a longer period of copyright protection. A longer overall life expectancy, moreover, does not in itself imply that the second generation loses anything in comparison with earlier eras. The crucial age for the second generation is not the absolute number of years grandchildren may be expected to live but rather the number of years they survive after the author's (i.e., their grandparent's) death. The copyright period is measured from the death of the author, and if grandchildren are living longer, so too are authors themselves. Certainly no one has provided data to show that grandchildren of today have significantly longer life expectancies than today's grandparents, let alone 20 years longer. Consequently, we should expect the current cohort of authorial grandchildren to remain alive for roughly the same length of time after their grandparents' deaths as at other times in this century. Second, protection of two generations of descendants is not the inevitable result hi a longer protection period. The copyright in a work that has been exploited and become popular will often have been transferred by the author or her descendants. Any termination rights with respect to the work will have already been exercised before the descendants in question here ever Written Testimony of Intellectual Property Professors Page 11