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)

416 Mr. Karjala. As I listened to him, it appeared that he was assuming that the author still held the copyright, and I think much of his testimony was predicated on that. I certainly assumed that he still held all the copyrights to his works. I don't think he actually said one way or the other, but that was my assumption on the basis of his testimony. Mr. Hoke. All right, well, in any event, I've got a couple of areas that I'd like to look into with respect to this. Professor Karjala, I'm trying to get a handle on exactly what your complaint is with respect to the extension and outside of this other issue that has come to light through other testimony, and it seems to me — and I'm going to ask you to recharacterize this because I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems to me that you had two basic complaints about it or objections to it. One is that you believe that material in the public domain is the source of inspiration for new material, and the other is I got the idea that you had some sort of a general dissatisfaction with the notion of creating welfare system for authors' estates or children. Am I — maybe you could recharacterize that. Mr. Karjala. Well, yes. I apologize for not saying it as clearly as I'm sure is possible. I may not even be any more successful. I think the point, my basic point was that our current system, and our very successful system, has always been predicated Mr. Hoke. The old way is always the best way kind of an argument? Mr. Karjala. No, no, no. Well, it's been very successful and I think we should be careful about changing something that's been very successful. I don't say that the old way is always the best way, but we have a long history of carefully balancing both sides, and nobody who works in this field I think disagrees that there is a public interest involved in granting Mr. Hoke. What are the bad things that are going to happen if we extend it 20 years? That's what I'm trying to determine. And is there something bad other than not having more Mr. Karjala. The bad things are two. Mr. Hoke [continuing]. Public domain material? Mr. Karjala. No. 1, there's a cost to the public. Contrary to the example that Mr. Jones gave this morning, he gave a Tolstoy book and a Mr. Hoke. John Grisham. Mr. Karjala [continuing]. John — what's his name? Mr. Hoke. Grisham. Mr. Karjala. Right. Sure, a Tolstoy book may sell, I don't know, 1,000, 5,000 copies a year; a Grisham book sells millions of copies. It may well be that you have to charge that kind of a price for a Tolstoy book just to cover the fixed cost of production. It may be that if Tolstoy were not in the public domain, it wouldn't get published at all. I don't think the fact that they sell at the same price necessarily means the public isn't paying a royalty. When a royalty is flowing to the publisher or to the author, somebody's paying that. Now Representative Schroeder asked some questions this morning: Was the market working or not? I see no reason, no evidence to say that the market, the free market, does not work for copyright-protected works. If you do believe that the