1601 1000 800 600 400 200 1958 1963 Source US Census of Manufactures 1958. and preliminary report MC 63 (p)-27-A-3, 1963 Mr. FRASE. Starting on the first page, I would like to read two pages until we come to an historical section which I will summarize. My name is Robert W. Frase, and I am director of the joint Washington office of the American Book Publishers Council and the American Textbook Publishers Institute. I am testifying today on behalf of these two organizations, the members of which publish more than 95 percent of the total volume of all books produced in the United States. Members include not only commercial firms but many of the university presses and the publishing departments of religious denominations. My statement today is concerned solely with the manufacturing clause and related import restrictions which, reduced to essentials, now require American (but not foreign) authors to have their books manufactured in this country to secure full term U.S. copyright. We believe that this trade protection device, first adopted over 70 years ago, no longer serves any useful purpose for the printing industry and is a handicap to American science, technology, and scholarship. We join with other organizations in urging complete repeal of these manufacturing provisions, rather than the modifications proposed in chapter 6 of H.R. 4347. Other groups advocating repeal include the American Council on Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Guild of Authors & Composers, the American Library Association, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, the Association of American University Presses, the Authors League of America, the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America, the Joint Libraries Committee on Copyright, the Music Publishers Association of the United States, and the Music Publishers Protective Association. As the staff economist of the council, I have given special attention to the economics of the manufacturing clause over a period of more than 10 years. In 1954, I presented an analysis to this subcommittee and the similar Senate subcommittee on the economic effects of the partial repeal of the manufacturing clause required if the United States was to adhere to the Universal Copyright Convention. I predicted then that the elimination of the clause for works produced by citizens of other countries adhering to the UCC, which was subsequently adopted by the Congress, would produce positive economic benelits to American authors, publishers, book manufacturers, members of the printing trades unions, and the American public at large. This turned out to be the case despite the contrary predictions of the opponents of the Universal Copyright Convention. In the 9 years from the U.S. Census of Manufactures of 1954 to the same census in 1963, the dollar volume of U.S. book sales more than doubled, from $665 million to $1,502 million. In the same period, the favorable balance of U.S. book exports over imports increased in about the same ratio, from $17 million to $40 million. These are the official Government figures, which are acknowledged to underestimate exports seriously because small shipments are not counted. Following some introductory remarks concerning the history of the manufacturing clause and the nature of the Register's proposal for further modification contained in H.R. 4347, I shall present the economic case, supported by statistical evidence, for the complete and final repeal of the clause. Now, the following several pages, up to page 8, deal with the historical origins of the manufacturing clause which I will attempt to summarize. I thought it might be useful to get this into the record because the question has been raised as to how we happen to have such a thing in the first place and why are we the only country in the world that does have a manufacturing clause. It grew out of a very special set of circumstances in 19th-century America. Most of the European countries began giving reciprocal copyright protection to authors of other countries starting in the 1820's. This trend was substantially complete in the 1850's and by the 1880's this whole system of reciprocal acknowledgement of copyright was formalized in the Berne Convention, the first of the international copyright conventions. The United States did not join in this movement to recognize copyrights of foreign authors, and I think this grew out of two circumstances. One, we had a tradition of denying even real property rights to foreigners. Many of our States would not allow foreigners to hold real property. Second, our publishers and printers had access to the entire popular literature of the ex-home country, England. It didn't have to be translated; it only had to be reproduced and, in fact, aside from the textbooks, our whole book publishing industry starting in the 1820's was built on the piracy of British works. Starting with Senator Clay in late 1830, various moves were made to grant copyright protection to foreigners on a reciprocal basis. Charles Dickens, when he came here to lecture in the late 1840's, made this a particular point. The first Clay bills were introduced in 1837. But the opposition of the book printers and manufacturers and their allies like the papermakers was much too strong for many years, and overcame the desire of American authors to have copyright protection afforded on an international basis, for two reasons. One, if American printers could get the best of European authors, and, in particular, English authors, starting with Scott, Dickens, and all the rest, they were not disposed to pay an American author for doing his book; he was lucky if he got it done free. Two, there was pirating of American literature in Britain, as well. But up until the 1870's, the authors and some publishers allied with them had no success whatsoever with Congress. Meanwhile, there had grown up a practice of "trade courtesy" among the pirate publishers and book printers where one who first got the work of an author and pirated it was respected by his colleagues; they wouldn't pirate from him. This trade custom seemed to work fairly well among the established people in the business, but beginning in the 1870's some new printers came into the business who didn't respect the trade customs. They began to produce a horde of cheap books which were pirated from their American colleagues who had pirated them in the first place from Great Britain, and they really broke down the whole structure of the book publishing industry. The American printers joined with the authors and brought in with them the growing printing unions who were beginning to be interested because these new companies were not employing union labor. So, there was a coalition of all the people concerned and others like the American Library Association and National Education Association. Then in 1891, we finally gave foreigners protection in countries which would do the same thing for us, but the printing trade unions in particular insisted on a manufacturing clause. The printers and publishers would have been satisfied with a partial manufacturing clause, that is, they wanted the printing to be done here but they were happy enough to import plates from the British editions so the type didn't have to be set over again. That was not enough for the unions; they wanted the type set over again and that was what was required when we first gave copyright protection to foreign authors in 1891. This was true not only in the English language but also true in foreign languages. They required a foreign author, in order to get full-term copyright protection, to have his book manufactured in this country. The first law was pretty defective in accomplishing any protection for foreign authors because the manufacture in this country had to be simultaneous: the publication of the edition had to be simultaneous with the publication abroad and except for a few well-known British authors who could make arrangements in advance, this was not feasible. Then, over the years, there began a series of modifications. In 1909, we removed the manufacturing clause from the foreign language material, but also at the same time we added binding and we added periodicals which had not been covered in the original manufacturing clause--which had only applied to books, photographs, chromos, and lithographs. In 1919, we gave the foreign authors a few more days' leeway. We gave them 60 days after publication to have their book registered for copyright in the United States and 4 months temporary or ad interim copyright, to permit remanufacture here. Then in 1949 there was a major relaxation for foreign authors that granted them 6 months after publication for registration here and 5 years for ad interim copyright for U.S. manufacture, and also pernitted 1,500 copies to be imported. Then in 1954, the really major change was made in permitting foreign authors who were nationals or residents of the Universal Copyright Convention countries to get automatic copyrights for their works in the United States without any requirement for manufacture. This elimination of the manufacturing clause for these foreign authors was necessary as a condition of our adherence to the Universal Copyright Convention, and it also gives us protection in the opposite way, because we get automatic protection in some 50 countries now who are members of the Universal Copyright Convention, with no formalities except the notice of copyright in the work. By that time, we had become the world's leading producers of all kinds of creative works and it was very much in our interest to protect our copyrights abroad. I will come back to the argument in 1954 about the manufacturing clause at a later time, and the fears expressed that it would result in a good deal of importation of books which had been previously manufactured here. Let me now read on pages 9, 10, and 11 what the clause really means at the present time in practical terms. At the present time, the manufacturing clause applies only to works in English in whole or in part by American authors or by citizens of those few countries (like Australia) that have not joined the Universal Copyright Convention. Books by American authors must be wholly manufactured in the United States to get a full-term copyright. What this means depends on whether the work is produced by letterpress or by lithography. A letterpress book is printed from raised type, either the original type or a plate made from it. An offset lithographed work or book is printed from a flat surface so treated that ink will not adhere to parts of the surface. Offset lithograph plates are almost always made from films, which in turn are made by photographing the material to be printed. The requirement of the manufacturing clause that the actual printing and binding be done in the United States applies to all books falling under the clause regardless of the method of printing. In the case of works printed by letterpress, the law further specifically requires that the work be printed from type set in the United States or from plates made in the United States from type set here. If the work is printed by lithography, the specific requirement of typesetting in the United States is omitted, and the requirement instead is only that the copies must be produced "by a process wholly performed in the United States," Since it is generally understood that the lithographic process begins with the act of photographing the material to be reproduced, whatever it may be, it has been considered that a work complies with the manufacturing clause if the lithographic process from first film to bound book is wholly performed in the United States, though the material lithographed may be a so-called "reproduction proof" made from type set abroad. That is, one clean set of proof sheets may be made abroad and sent to the United States. It may then be photographed, made into plates, printed and bound here. This practice is usually advantageous only for scientific, technical, and scholarly works in small editions, for which the presence of foreign language phrases, mathematical equations, chemical formulas, et cetera, makes it impractical to set type by the familiar and relatively inexpensive linotype method, and requires typesetting by hand or monotype machine. Though such books make up a trivial part of the dollar volume of American book production-and an invisibly small part of American printing generally-they are essential to American progress in science, technology, and scholarship. I have asked Mr. Barnes to bring along a couple of samples of such work and he will produce them after my testimony. A very few hundred books by American authors, certainly less than 3 percent of our annual production of new and revised book titles, are produced annually from reproduction proofs. This has in no way |