immediate future so that I can avail myself of your kind invitation to have them present?

Mr. Buck. That I will do, sir.

The decision won after the three years' fighting, the American society came into existence, and from that day to this moment the opposition started.

The CHAIRMAN. What apposition started?

Mr. Buck. Users of copyrightable material for profit in public performance, namely, the restaurant owners, the dance-hall proprietors, the motion-picture owners, and later on, the radio industry. The CHAIRMAN. They all began to abuse you?

Mr. Buck. Instantly. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers-I understand it has been called through the years, in this very Hall, a great octopus that reaches out over the country and throttles men.

The CHAIRMAN. In other words, your society was characterized by these different groups as an octopus?

Mr. BUCK. Yes; and it reached the stage, at the last session of Congress, as you have given expression to-day, racketeer.

The CHAIRMAN. As a matter of fact, haven't you been called a racketeer on the floor of Congress?

Mr. Buck. You did, sir.

Mr. Buck. I was, sir; and I wish to put into the record that the gentleman displayed bad taste in calling such men as

The CHAIRMAN (interposing). Mark you, the men were not called racketeers; it was only the method in which the organization was operated. I want to go on record for the Members of Congress and this committee that Congress believes that a society is absolutely necessary to look after the authors, composers, and publishers; they believe they are entitled to their royalties, every dollar that legitimately belongs to them, but what the Members of Congress and the committee were opposed to was the manner which the society utilized in raising that fund, and that is what we referred to as a racketeering proposition.

Mr. BUCK. Mr. Chairman, I am sure you will grant me the right to state what this society is.

The CHAIRMAN. I want you to say anything your heart desires; I want to be fair with you, Mr. Buck, so you can not say I have not given you a chance.

Mr. BUCK. Let's see who are members of this society. They consist of such men as John Phillip Sousa-it is my great privilege, sir; to bring him down here to-day, he is present-and I wish to say that when most of us are forgotten, and as long as music is played, this great composer will be remembered as the outstanding march king of the world. He stands alongside me as the vice president of this society. Victor Herbert, before he died, made me the president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

The CHAIRMAN. I personally want to pay tribute to you, Mr. Sousa. I was a little boy when your march, The Stars and Stripes Forever, was as popular with enlisting men in the Spanish-American War as George M. Cohen's Over There, or Irving Berlin's It is Hard to Get Up in the Morning, or my colleague, Sigmund Romberg's song May Time. You have the most interesting organization in America.

Mr. Buck. If this is a great organization they should not be put in the category of a group of racketeers. I can not reconcile myself to that statement.

The CHAIRMAN. I will tell you why, Mr. Buck. Your society is composed of the finest composers in the world, the grandest men in the world, the loveliest characters in the world, and there isn't a word that this committee or the Congress of the United States could say against one author or composer. We haven't a word against them, but you have a society that is run by 12 publishers who represent the producers and publishers of music, and 12 members of the board who represent the composers. Your board of directors is composed of 24 men. I would like to know if this group of the wonderful men you have mentioned have any part in the appointment of the members of the board of directors. It is your 24 men who run it, and I have the highest respect for the 24 men, too; but things have cropped out among the 24 men that have made a bad impression upon our country.

Mr. BUCK. I trust, sir, that I will be given the opportunity to complete my thought.

I merely want to enumerate-Mr. George Cohen, Mrs. Carrie Jacobs Bond, Sigmund Romberg, Jerome B. Kern, Charles Wakefield, a good man, one of the board of directors-the so-called group of racketeers-Mr. Olie Speaks, who wrote The Road to Mandalay, and whose brother graced this Congress until the last session-John Speaks, of Ohio.

I am president of this society; Mr. Sousa is vice president; Mr. Bernstein is vice president; the treasurer is Irving Berlin's publisher, Sol. Bernstein; the secretary of the society is Mr. Joe Young, popular song writer, a very skillful writer.

The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers consists of all types of writers and composers, namely, what we would call the standard group.

The CHAIRMAN. How long is this board elected for?

Mr. BUCK. One year, two years, and three years, like all boards. The CHAIRMAN. Who elects the board?

Mr. Buck. The board elects itself.

The CHAIRMAN. It is a self-electing board?

Mr. Buck. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. What are the numbers that constitute the membership of this society?

Mr. BUCK. About 670 members.

The CHAIRMAN. Do they elect the 12 members of the board of directors?

Mr. BUCK. No.

The CHAIRMAN. They have nothing to say?

Mr. BUCK. Oh, yes; they have something to say.

The CHAIRMAN. For the sake of the record, how do they elect them?

Mr. Buck. I would like to clear that up. It is a volunteer organization. The board of directors is divided into groups of writers, namely, production writers, those who write plays, like Mr. Romberg, Mr. Kern and myself, who do musical plays, musical compositions; Mr. Walter Donaldson, and popular-song writers like Mr. Olie Speaks, representing what we call standard writers.

When a vacancy occurs on the board of directors the men of that group go among their group and find out whom they want to represent them on the board. There are 670 writer members, and these gentlemen are classified as A writers, B writers, C writers, and D writers. If you did not have such a system of the 670 writers possibly the D class could outvote and eliminate such men as Herbert and Sousa and Kern and Romberg, and men whom we think in the musical business have the intellectual insight and the intellectual accomplishments to sit in this room as directors.

The CHAIRMAN. About how many members are publishers?
Mr. Buck. I believe about 93 or 94.

The CHAIRMAN. Go right ahead with your story. You left off where you referred to these various groups that were fighting your organization, after the decision of Justice Holmes.

Mr. Buck. In 1917, the minute the society was fortified with the right to stop these gentlemen from taking their material, the creation of their brains, unless they paid for it, what was the society confronted with? It never was confronted with Mr. Shanley, but the Hot-Cha Cabaret, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the John Jones Picture House, as a unit.

It was instantly confronted with an attorney for the Picture Owners' Association, an attorney for the Hotel Owners' Association, and attorney for the Cabaret Owners' Association.

The CHAIRMAN. You tried to get an interpretation of public performance for profit where everyone would have to pay an entrance fee?

Mr. Buck. That is it. We who create things have always felt deeply that a person who devotes his life to earning a livelihood by the products of his brain is entitled to just as much protection as if be worked with his hands.

The CHAIRMAN. The Committee agrees with you.

Mr. Buck. I come here for the sake of those we honor, those who are not attorneys, who can not help themselves.

The CHAIRMAN. That is a wonderful statement to make, and the Members of Congress are in sympathy with you, that each genius who contributes with his mind to the happiness and enjoyment of other people should be entitled to all the rewards that come to him without letting the major part go to others.

Mr. Buck. I am leading to a point there, because this is absolutely essential, if you will let me finish-Congress charges that this is wrong, through wholesale cooperation that it is a monopoly. What is a patent but a monopoly? And who can interpret it for anything else?

The CHAIRMAN. The Constitution gives you that; it is a monopoly. Mr. Buck. If I make a chair, that is a monopoly.

The CHAIRMAN. Nobody denies it.

Mr. Buck. There seems to be a question here about those who choose to earn their living by the products of their brain, as set apart, in legislative matters, from those who work with their hands. If you own a house, that is yours forever until you sell it and you do as you wish with it-it is the same thing if I own a song or a book. Take William Hamilton Osborn, who writes magazine stories, if he builds a great story, he is entitled to that. There seems to be

a question here that the author is not entitled to it; they tell us we should have limitations and restrictions, and it has been going on.

I am now talking about the charge pertaining to monopoly because I think copyright is excluded; I believe it is a monopoly, and I want to get that in the record here so that there will be no question of that.

The CHAIRMAN. If you insist upon putting that in the record, then I will follow that up by stating, to show you that Congress knows its business, that Article I, section 8, paragraph 8, of the Constitution says:

Congress shall have the power to promote the useful arts and sciences by granting to every inventor for a limited number of years the exclusive right to his writings and discoveries.

You are getting a right here, a monopoly here, for 56 years. We want to protect you; we want to protect the author and the composer, but protection means that he is entitled to a fair share of the money that he earns, to be returned to him.

Mr. Buck. May I go on?

The CHAIRMAN. Go right ahead.

Mr. Buck. The society is not trying to explain to you, sir, any endeavor to assert this right. I am not getting to the necessity for the Society of Composers and Authors getting together to protect themselves.

The CHAIRMAN. In other words, when this decision of Justice Holmes came along, you had to have a society.

Mr. Buck. It is absolutely necessary because this is a Nation that reaches from the seaboard to the Gulf, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We need it, and you are in sympathy with the society. Now, what did we do? The society set up the machinery of engaging representatives, and when they found a person infringing, he was asked to recognize this right.

Now, sir, the American Society has been more or less of an educational thing in this respect and I, as its president say that I want to make it very clear for the record that I have sympathy with a man that owns a picture house, that owns a dance hall, when a man comes to him and says: "We want a fee-whether it is $10 or $15 or a hundred dollars-for the right to play music in that place." I can understand the psychology of that man in saying: "What is that for, what right have you got to ask me? I bought a sheet of music."

I understand that psychology. Now, our representative must start to educate that man, that there he is performing publicly for profit something that belongs to the composers and authors of this country. Some men-it is human-resent it, and some men carry their resentment to the greatest extreme.

The CHAIRMAN. And they have a right to.

Mr. BUCK. Pardon me, I don't question it. I am the man who has gone on record in this hearing who does not question that right. The CHAIRMAN. Let's take the motion-picture industry for example. When your organization started out with the motion-picture industry, I understand from the men who have been here representing that industry that there were 20,000 motion-picture houses, representing 12,000,000 seats, and they started like a little nickelodeon; you charged 10 cents for every seat.

Mr. BUCK. Ten cents a seat a year; that is the important part. The CHAIRMAN. May I go on, Mr. Buck, if I am not interrupting you? You are satisfied to have me ask you?

Mr. Buck. That is right.

The CHAIRMAN. You are charging 10 cents a seat a year for all motion-picture seats throughout the country for every little theater and for every big theater; is that right? I mean, is there a uniformity in price?

Mr. Buck. That is right.

The CHAIRMAN. Now, if you can tell me and you are a fairminded man, a very brilliant man, Mr. Buck, an intelligent man, and we have admiration for the work you are doing-if you can tell the Congress and the committee, of which I am chairman, how you can charge a little fellow in a little country town, who plays music once a night, 10 cents for a seat year, as you say it, and yet when you come into our big cities where you have Roxy's and the Paramount and other houses playing 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 and 4,000,000 selections a year, and yet charge them 10 cents, is it fair to put the burden on a small motion-picture house and ask him to pay as much as the large organization? We have income-tax in our country, and it is the big fellow that has to pay the most taxes. Do you think your policy is right?

Mr. BUCK. May I say, sir, I heartily agree with you in your mental process, in your logic; but may I say, for the sake of the record that this association in its early beginning had to lay a foundation like a child that has to learn to creep, we had to find out a lot of things. May I say to you, sir, there was no such thing as Roxy's Theater in the year 1913. At that time there were small picture houses; these enormous picture houses were undreamed of at that time.

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May I tell you how we arrived at the 10 cents a year? We had a tremendous fight with the motion-picture industry, naturally, when we said we wanted to get 10 cents a seat a year. Those fellows said: Oh, no, we will fight you in court," and they did, and we were upheld on that. At that time, I am of the opinion that the executives of the society, those who had charge of making deals with our licensees and those who desired to buy rights, with the motion-picture owners themselves, grouped together with the society and made it 10 cents a year. I think it is a great credit to the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and their conservatism, sir, that since the year 1914 up this 1932 it has not been changed.

The CHAIRMAN. Just a moment; I will show you, if you are conservative, where you are unfair and where your society has been outrageous in its treatment. We want to see justice done to the little motion-picture operator who is entitled to a square deal; if he pays 10 cents, the big fellow should pay more. How about your charges to great, big, radio corporations? You don't charge the little radio man the same price you do the big fellow with the big station and a large amount of power. You charge less to the little station-why should you discriminate against the little motion-picture man?

Mr. Buck. Mr. Chairman, that is very easy to answer. After the cabaret came into existence, then the motion-picture owner came in, the dance hall followed-just a minute, and I will lead up to that.