tection of foreign works, but also to eliminate certain formalities now required of domestic authors from which foreign authors are exempt under the Universal Copyright Convention and the Buenos Aires Copyright Convention. Such action is clearly indicated, but appears to be beyond the scope of this particular study. It is my personal feeling that all authors, regardless of nationality, should be able to have their works protected in the United States, although they may be barred from receiving any income from those works if American authors are barred from receiving income when their works are used in the countries of which the particular authors are nationals. In other words, it seems to me that a distinction should be drawn between the recognition of an author's property rights and the conditions under which he will be permitted to enjoy the fruits of his labors at a particular time. We certainly hope that many of the countries which now do not have copyright relations with the United States will some day join the Universal Copyright Convention, or will amend their laws so as to protect American works. If that should happen, the authors should be able to receive income on works which were previously published rather than suffer those works to remain permanently in the public domain. If this principle is feasible, Mr. Bogsch's alternative 3 on page fourteen, might be changed to read as follows: "3. Extend protection to the works of all authors regardless of their nationality, except as the president by proclamation may (a) withhold or restrict protection as to the works of nationals of another particular country, (b) provide for issuance of licenses for the use of such works in the United States, (c) impose restrictions on the transfer to such nationals of any funds earned in the United States from the use of such works." I have not thought this through enough to say that this expresses my final views but it is something that we may discuss further as a possible approach to the subject. I think we should all look forward to the time when we will be able to do away entirely with the present proclamation system and would, therefore, vote in principle for adoption of that approach. On the other hand, I think we should bear in mind that our foremost objective for the time being should be toward ratification of the Universal Copyright Convention on the part of those many countries which have not yet agreed to do so and which have failed thus far to make the necessary adjustments in their domestic copyright legislation. Were we to provide that copyright protection in the United States would be available to authors of those counrries automatically, this might conceivably result in a reaction on the part of those countries either to delay or to forgo altogether accession and ratification of the U.C.C. This would, of course, be true to a greater extent with regard to those countries which would not immediately benefit from the resulting inapplicability of the manufacturing provision of our law; in other words, countries such as Canada or Australia would in all probability still make every effort to adhere to the Convention because only in that event would works first published there in the English language enjoy copyright in the U.S.A. despite foreign manufacture. But other nonmember countries, in which books are published in a language other than English, might conclude that there would no longer be any real need for ratification of the U.C.C. if U.S. copyright protection were automatically extended by statute to all foreign works. I am not unaware that even these small misgivings about 62629-61- -5 slowing up ratification of the Convention may not be serious enough to prevent us from adopting the position that, as a matter of principle, works of foreign authorship should be afforded copyright protection regardless of proclamations. Should it be decided, however, to adopt Dr. Bogsch's alternative No. 1, then I would suggest that favorable consideration be given to a few important modifications to which reference is also made at pages 9-10 of Dr. Bogsch's study: 1. In order to bring our overall copyright system into closer accord with the basic principles on which the Universal Copyright Convention is founded, we should place works first published in a proclaimed country in the same category with works of citizens of such country. In other words, the proclamation should apply to both these categories, as does the U.C.C. today. I need hardly add that I would like to see such protection extended even to works first published in proclaimed countries by U.S. citizens, since I strongly feel that a work by a U.S. author and published in a foreign country either in English or in a foreign language should be considered "a work of foreign origin". 2. As Dr. Bogsch points out on page 10, there would seem to be no need to retain the "open convention" basis for proclamations. WALTER J. DERENBERG. |