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)

419 barriers to entry and without putting at risk our longrun creativity, I discuss a default liability regime for incremental innovation in my article, "Legal Hybrids Between the Patent and Copyright Paradigms," which appeared in the December 1994 issue of the Columbia Law Review. But you're opening a whole new can of worms. Without going that far, your observations do raise questions about whether existing rights are going to work in multimedia, and whether these existing rights are going to work in a digitalized age on the Internet. And I believe that a congressional investigation of an innovation law that, a priori, said we are not going to be bound necessarily by these old paradigms would be very useful for all of these purposes. I don't think any premature action should be taken, but if we don't start the ball rolling what's going to happen is that we're going to be inundated by bad European directives after another. This morning we heard about the database directive. I believe the pending EC data base directive was already appalling in its second incarnation, the second amended proposal, but the one good thing it had was a compulsory license for sole source publishing where you really had a 100-percent monopoly. Now, however, the Commission has eliminated even the compulsory license for sole source monopolies, and the staff is saying privately, well, we had to do it, we know it's wrong. So if we don't start taking now and begin a study of what is the appropriate innovation policy and law for the United States, we're going to end up hearing again and again endless testimony in which our officials come in and say, well, Europe did it, so we have to do it, too. If Europe wants to get itself into a position where it is technologically monopolized, and thereby, in my view, becomes progressively uncompetitive with respect to those emerging markets in Asia, that's their business, but no one will convince me that that is good policy for the United States. Mr. Hoke. I want to finish with one final thought, and that is that I think it's clear that we are creating with this bill new wealth that doesn't exist today. We're creating money, capital, wealth, property that doesn't exist, and we're creating a lot of it. And I want to be clearly on the record that it is — I have no interest in creating new wealth for other than the creators, that that is the talent, the creators of the property itself. And my personal background is as a musician. I've always considered myself to be a musician first before a lawyer or a business person or a Member of Congress. And it seems to me that because both my own personal feelings about this and also because I know what — I know very profoundly and deeply what the value is and what the uniqueness is of the creative process, that when we, the Congress, create new property out of old cloth that did not exist before, that property should be created for the benefit of those people who made it in the first place. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. MOORHEAD. Thank you very much. I have just a couple of questions I wanted to ask. Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Chairman, I noticed that Professor Karjala was hoping to get an interjection in. Mr. MoORHEAD. Do you have something you wanted to say?