ing of congressional hearings on the bill. Over a period of more than 3 months, between May 26, 1965 and September 2, 1965, 22 days of public hearings were held before your subcommittee, under the objective and dedicated chairmanship of the man who is still your chairman, Robert W. Kastenmeier.

A total of 163 witnesses, representing an extraordinarily wide range of public and private interests, appeared to testify. The record of those 1965 hearings comprises nearly 2,000 pages of printed text, including not only the oral transcript but also more than 150 written statements.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee under the chairmanship of John McClellan of Arkansas, held brief hearings on the Revision. bill in August 1965, but delayed a full series pending the conclusion of the intense activity in the House subcommittee.

Several significant factors with respect to the general revision program emerged from the 1965 hearings. Most obvious were the sharp controversies remaining to be settled on some old issuessuch as the jukebox exemption, the royalty rate to be paid under the compulsory license for recording music, and the manufacturing requirements with respect to English-language books and periodicalsand on some relatively new issues-such as fair use, and the reproduction of copyrighted works for educational and research purposes, the liability of educational broadcasters and similar transmitters, and the status of community antenna television systems under the copyright law.

Aside from the need to work out further accommodations on several critical issues, the most serious problem arising from the 1965 hearing was how to organize the massive contents of the record in a way that would overlook no significant comment or suggestion but that still would form a comprehensible basis for decisionmaking. Let me say a personal word about those 51 days of subcommittee meetings, since they were very significant.

Working in close collaboration, the Copyright Office and the House Judiciary Committee counsel prepared summaries of every statement that had been made, and then divided the entire corpus of the hearings into 10 general areas: Subject matter of copyright, ownership, duration, notice and registration, manufacturing and importa tion requirements, community antenna systems and other secondary transmissions, jukebox performances, compulsory license for phono records, educational copying and fair use, and educational broadcasting and other performing rights.

Each subject was then divided into subtopics, under which were listed every issue raised at the hearings.

The "experiment in legislative technique." as it has been called, proved effective. I think the effectiveness will become more and more apparent as you progress in 1975. It enabled the House Judiciary Subcommittee, in its deliberations of the bill, to consider each issue in context, to weigh the arguments for and against it, and to arrive at reasoned decisions.

Meeting regularly, usually twice a week, from February through September 1966, the subcommittee held 51 executive sessions, all of which were attended by representatives of the Copyright Office. Examining each issue in depth and then redrafting the pertinent sec

tion of the bill as they went along, the subcommittee produced an entirely revised bill in an atmosphere of informal, bipartisan discussions that could well serve as a model for similar legislative projects. The bill, as revised by the subcommittee, was reported unanimously to the full House Judiciary Committee on September 21, 1966, and was reported without amendment by the full Judiciary Committee on October 12, 1966.

The House report still remains the basic legislative explanation of the content of the bill, and the reports succeeding it in both Houses have all been drawn from it.

The bill was reported too late in the 89th Congress for further legislative action, and indeed, none had been expected in 1966. In the revised form reported by the House, it was introduced by Representative Celler in the 90th Congress, and was considered by the newly constituted membership of Subcommittee No. 3, again chaired by Representative Kastenmeier, on February 20, 24, and 27, 1967.

It was reported to the full committee on the last of these dates, and, after rather heated debates in the full committee on February 28 and March 2, 1967, was again reported to the House.

This time, however, the report included minority views by Representatives Byron G. Rogers of Colorado and Basil L. Whitener of North Carolina, devoted to the jukebox issue, and additional dissent by Mr. Whitener on the bill's treatment of CATV.

It was becoming increasingly apparent, as the bill moved toward the House floor, that extremely sharp and unreconciled conflicts on the issues of jukebox performance and CATV transmissions remained, and that there was a serious danger that one or both of these issues could defeat the bill.

The bill was considered by the House Rules Committee on March 8, 1967, and the rather acrimonious arguments in the committee before it took action authorizing full debate on the House floor were another danger signal.

The debates of the bill in the House of Representatives on April 6, 1967, were difficult and protracted, to say the least. When the House finally recessed after 7 p.m., it was apparent that a rescue operation was essential. Over the next 4 days, in an atmosphere of intense crisis, several crucial compromises were achieved, and on Tuesday, April 11, 1967, an amended bill was passed by the House after mild debate with the extraordinary vote of 379 yeas to 29 nays.

Fairly radical changes were made in three areas: There were drastic revisions in the provisions establishing copyright liability for jukebox performances; the provisions dealing with community antenna transmission were dropped entirely and the exemptions for instructional broadcasting were considerably broadened. On the other hand, the structure and content of the bill itself has remained substantially intact.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, which had opened hearings in 1965, and had had a short series of hearings on the CATV problem in 1966, resumed full-scale consideration of the bill, under the joint. chairmanship of Senators McClellan and Burdick, on March 15, 1967.

Indeed, the Senate hearings were in full swing during the crisis in the House, and for a time the general revision program resembled a

two-ring circus in more ways than one. To everyone's surprise the record of the Senate hearings, which lasted 10 days and ended on April 28, 1967, very nearly equals that of the House hearings in size and content.

Of the several areas that emerged as fullblown issues at the Senate hearings, by far the most important is the problem of the use of copyrighted works in automated information storage and retrieval systems. This problem was addressed separately in the context of the creation of a National Commission on New Technological Uses which Congress enacted as separate legislation only last year, and which is still awaiting staffing from the White House.

Meanwhile, as the 1967 legislative momentum began to slow more and more, it was increasingly apparent that cable television had become the make-or-break issue for copyright revision. Although the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee worked long and hard between 1968 and 1970 to resolve controversies over a number of issues other than cable, and succeeded in reporting the revised bill to the full Senate Judiciary Committee during the 91st Congress, it was not able to push revision any further.

An effort spearheaded by the Copyright Office to gain enactment of a "barebones" bill, containing everything except the cable section and other controversial provisions dealing with economic rights, also failed for tactical reasons.

By 1971, it was apparent that the bill was completely stymied over the CATV issue, and even the issuance of comprehensive FCC rules in 1972, governing the carriage of signals and programing by cable systems, failed to break the impasse.

Because of this long delay, Congress has passed a series of successive bills extending the term of expiring copyrights. These now run through the end of the current Congress, and are scheduled to expire on December 31, 1976. The urgent problem of tape piracy was also taken care of through separate legislation.

A total of 7 years passed between House passage of the bill in 1967 and the resumption of its active consideration in the Senate subcommittee last year.

There may have been other reasons, but certainly the most immediate cause of the Revision bill's new momentum was the Supreme Court's decision in CBS v. Teleprompter, in March 1974, holding that under the 1909 statute, cable systems are not liable for copyright infringement when they import distant signals.

The decision was followed quickly by favorable actions in the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee and full committee and, after a brief referral to the Commerce Committee, by passage in the Senate on September 9, 1975, by a vote of 70 to 1.

In late November, your subcommittee held a hearing which, in one respect, was a forerunner of these hearings. I testified in an optimistic rein at that time, and I remain hopeful that at long last the entire revision measure will be enacted into law during the current Congress. Mr. Chairman, this is the end of my prepared statement, but I would also like to identify seven or perhaps eight issues which will certainly come before you. I am preparing what I hope will be a second supplementary report of the register of copyrights which will be

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available to you and also to the subcommittee by the time you need to consider the bill in a markup sense.

This would not be something that would be part of the record of this hearing, but I would hope that I might have a chance to speak to it again later toward the end of these hearings or perhaps during the markup sessions.

I have no intention now in trying to guess what the other witnesses are going to say or in arguing anyone's case.

My feeling as the head of the Copyright Office is that my responsibility is to one group and one group only, and that is the group that is identified as the sole and only beneficiary of the copyright law of the United States under the Constitution, the authors of the so-called writings. In other words, the creators of copyrighted works as we now know them.

I am profoundly of the belief that authors in this country have been treated shabbily and stingily from the very beginning of our copyright system.

And, whatever I say will be with the thought that the situation. of authors, not only as the creators of works of economic value, but as something that is infinitely precious to our country, needs to be promoted.

I don't think this has been done effectively under previous legislation. I will return to this point later. I am also conscious that everyone else besides the author is a user of the author's work, and as between users there may be arguments which are extremely persuasive for reasons unrelated to protection of the author but in some respects are irrelevant to the essential purpose of the copyright law.

In these areas I think compromises have been reached. I think compromises have been necessary and I think further compromises will be made. But it is vitally important that you consider the effect of a particular provision on the individual author and not primarily of its effect on an economic group using the author's work for good or for ill.

Turning to H.R. 2223, as it now stands, I will try to give you an idea of its framework and its approach and pinpoint a few of the major issues that you will be hearing debated in the weeks to come.

In the long, I am afraid, and rather boring statement that I made on the history of this project, I did want to make a point. Obviously, there is a long history behind the provisions in this bill, and aside from the chairman, all the members of your subcommittee are coming on it as new legislation, and you should not take it on faith.

No one in their right mind would ask you to. What I am trying to say, though, is that your predecessor members on the subcommittee went over most of these provisions in vast and searching detail. And, to a remarkable degree, aside from a few of the widely-publicized issues like cable, your subcommittee did its work so well that the basic legislation and its wording have become generally accepted.

A lot of things are not issues that once were, because what you did has been accepted. I think you will realize this as you go along.

Very simply, the present law is outdated, it is vague, it is ambiguous, it is arbitrary, and results in a great deal of unproductive work both on the part of those who have to operate under it and on the part of the Copyright Office.

It is completely unlike any other copyright law in the world and, in some cases, is simply a historic vestige. We have in this country a dual system of copyright. We are the only country that has this. We have a system that consists of common law copyright in a work up to the point of first publication. At that point the work either falls into the public domain or it becomes subject to statutory copyright. Publication is the dividing line between common law protection and either the public domain or the limited statutory protection of the 1909 law.

I don't think I need to stress that the concept of publication has now become outdated and slightly ridiculous. We are now in an era in which there are very few works that are not capable of being disseminated by media other than print, and many works never see print and are disseminated entirely through various electronic media. This system has resulted in peculiarities and injustices, none of these less than the monstrous formalities that were retained and added to in the 1909 law. The fact is that if you publish a work, publish in the print sense, without a copyright notice in the correct form and position, you throw your work into the public domain regardless of what your intentions were.

The revision bill attempts to deal with the entire copyright situation as it now exists and, to the extent that it is possible to predict it, into the next century.

It provides essentially a simple system which is nothing novel. This system exists everywhere in the world. It is a system of a term based on the creation of the work. In other words, when the author figuratively lifts his pen from his paper, he has a copyright under the Federal law and under the Constitution, and he has it for his lifetime.

There is no possibility that it would expire during his life, which is possible and in fact likely, under the present law. The international norm for the term of copyright is the life of the author plus 50 years. This is now in effect in a large majority of countries that have copyright laws.

Mr. DANIELSON. Mr. Chairman, I should like to inquire.
Mr. KASTENMEIER. The gentleman from California.

Mr. DANIELSON. Ms. Ringer, you just mentioned that automatically under the bill the creator has a lifetime copyright. Perhaps as we go along as a new member of this subcommittee, I will have my present question resolved.

As I read the Constitution it authorizes to secure for limited times and in the absence of compelling evidence I am going to assume we have the right to make that less than a lifetime.

Can you explain that difference, please?

Ms. RINGER. There is nothing unconstitutional about the present law which provides a first term of 28 years with a second term under a renewal system of 28 years; and as I mentioned this second term has been extended by recent enactments of Congress.

There is nothing unconstitutional about that. At the same time. I would find myself unable to agree with any argument that a term based on the life of the author and a finite number of years after his death was not a limited term.

Obviously people die. Everyone dies and that in itself is a limited term. If you add 50 years after that, you are definitely creating a limited term.