Lapas attēli
PDF
ePub

I would like to read you a few brief excerpts from the New York Times of May 22 and the Wall Street Journal of May 24. From the Times, May 22, on page 35 :

The Xerox Corp. made good yesterday on a promise made by Joseph C. Wilson, president, at the annual meeting on May 13. It entered the field of education in a big way. A joint announcement from Wesleyan University, of Middletown, Conn., and Xerox said that Xerox had purchased American Education Publications and Wesleyan University Press, Inc., for 400,000 shares of Xerox common.

Based on present market levels the transaction would be worth about $56 million. In return for its shares Xerox takes over what was described as the largest educational periodical publishing enterprise in the world.

Mr. Wilson, the president of Xerox, said that:

Recent acquisitions, including University Microfilms and Basic Systems, plus others to be announced in the next few months, only prove the great opportunities that have opened in the field of education and industrial training.

Mr. Clee, who is president of Wesleyan's Board of Trustees, is quoted in the Wall Street Journal of May 24 as saying that:

The decision to sell was made because we realized that the time had come for great technological advances in publishing and communication.

Gentlemen, the Authors League welcomes the advances that modern technology will certainly bring to the fields of education and of communication in years to come. They will be marvelous, astounding. Yet, no matter how marvelous or astounding they may be, they are no more than means to an end. They exist to help one man speak to another or to a child. It is the words that are spoken which count. Modern technology will never get rid of the author. Only blindness will do that; only the human error which declares that machines matter and people don't, that the expropriation of rights does not matter or is not very important one way or another. That is what is being said in the specious argument which urges you to make far-reaching changes in the law as it stands and in this bill before anyone can know what will come of them.

Gentlemen, I am married to an economist, an economic analyst. Over the years I have heard a little about the Xerox Corp., from time to time. If Xerox thinks that it is worth paying out stock valued at $56 million to get into the great growth field of education, then I believe them. I just hope that the authors of America can have their own place in this great growth field and get paid modestly for it.

A licensing scheme to do just this is not very hard to work out. We have a scheme ready to propose and I doubt very much that it is going to cost anything like $56 million.

When you think about it the authors seem to be about the only people in this great growth field who are being asked to join the party at their own expense. Teachers don't expect to get Xerox machines free nor even the paper to put into them in order to get our words to the children. The Authors League of America hopes that you will agree that the words are as important as the teachers say they are.

In fact, that they are important enough and valuable enough to be paid for.

Mr. STOUT. Thank you, Elizabeth. Mr. John Hersey.

STATEMENT OF JOHN HERSEY

Mr. HERSEY. I would like to speak to the question of the educational controversy you have heard about, and I hope you will indulge me if I present some credentials in that connection. I am an author. I live in the edifice of copyright but for more than 20 years my avocation has been education. I am a member of the board of the National Committee for Support of the Public Schools. I am on my local school board in the small town where I live. I am on the Literature Commission of the National Council of Teachers of English. And by chance this morning's papers tell of the fact that I am going to be spending the next 3 years of my life in one of our universities.

I say these things to assert to you that I not only believe in, but I have acted on my belief in, the supreme importance of education in our national life.

Having said that, I would like to sketch very roughly a picture that is suggested by the literature which has been circulated to a very large number of teachers in this country urging them to write you gentlemen letters about this bill. The picture is of a teacher in a small town in, let us say, Montana or Maine or Georgia, it does not matter where, and this is what she now sees will happen to her if this bill goes into law in its present form.

She loves literature and she wants to give her children the pleasure of knowing "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost. There is one copy of an anthology in the town public library which includes this poem. There is no bookstore in the town.

She takes a copy of the book to the superintendent's office where there is a duplicating machine, with the intention of making 26 copies to take to her children in her classroom. But there she discovers that because of something new which has come into this Copyright Act, she is going to be liable to suit if she does this, and that she is going to be liable to a fine of at least $100, and she feels very badly about this.

She feels that this situation is due to the cupidity of authors, and that there is something unpatriotic about the authors who are not willing to give to her children this glimpse of a corner of the American heritage.

I want now to suggest to you that there are some things that are rather importantly wrong with this picture. First of all, there is not something new that is going to be brought into this act which creates a new threat to this teacher.

The situation, as has been explained to you earlier today, with respect to this teacher, will be exactly the same as it has been for the last 56 years. I say to you gentlemen: as far as I know, and as far as I have been able to find out, there has never been an author who has brought suit against a teacher because of use of materials in a classroom, or even because of copying in the classroom.

If there is a suit in the future, I can also assert to you that it will not be because of violation of what we would consider to be fair use, but only because of some abuse.

As to these 26 copies she wants to make, I think that what is wrong with the picture is this: it would be very hard for you to devise language, in making the kinds of exceptions that the educators are asking for, that would limit copying to the sort of random copying that is

described. Once you opened this door, I think it would be very hard for you not to open it all the way, so that abuses would be admitted. Let me give you one possible example. It would be possible, if this exception were put through, for a teacher to make herself an anthology of poetic works. She could take a few lines here, a few lines there, and put together by one of these copying devices substantially an anthology of poetry. What is to prevent this anthology from being taken up by the whole school? What indeed is to prevent its being taken up by the whole school system? Imagine that a city like Pittsburgh taking on one of these anthologies and circulating it. This, I submit to you, could amount in the end to a direct competition with the regular channels of publishing, and would cause a deprivation to writers.

Mrs. Janeway has suggested to you the significance of Xerox buying into the largest single educational publishing enterprise in the world. Though it has been rightly said here you can't make accurate predictions as to what is going to happen technically, we writers are very concerned about such straws in the wind now.

In almost every public library there is now a machine into which you can put a quarter and take home a copied page of any book in the library. We conceive it quite possible, considering the enormous speed with which for instance television developed over the last 20 years, that within a short time you will be able to put a quarter in such a machine and take out not one page but the whole book.

We are very much concerned about what this may eventually mean cumulatively in the circulation of our works.

Now as to the question of the cupidity of writers, I would like to say that I am one of the fortunate ones who makes a living on his writings, but we have surveyed our members in the not too distant past in the Authors Guild, and at that time the average income of authors from writing was about $3,000 a year. It would be more than that now, but I think I can say to you with assurance that on the average writers earn less than teachers, earn less than librarians. To get along they have to moonlight. Ironically, in this context, one of the favorite methods of moonlighting is teaching. So be it.

Besides, it is not the fat cat writers, not the commercially successful ones, whose works by and large are reproduced for instruction; it is precisely the works of poets, of our most gifted writers, usually our least successful ones from a worldly standpoint.

I think we must consider the effect on them, and therefore in the long run on our culture, of a new inroad on their income. It seems ironical, at the moment when enormous new facilities for reproduction are coming along for distribution of written works, that these people should not be offered an increase but should actually be threatened with a decrease in their income.

Now on the question of the lack of patriotism of writers, we are a little injured by this implication. It strikes us that no one else who supplies materials to the schools is being offered this injury.

It has not been suggested that the Xerox Corp. should give to the schools free machines on which to do this kind of copying. Surely a roof over a school is a very important educational asset, but we have not seen any contractors asked to provide free roofs for the schools. As a member of a school board, I can tell you that teachers are not

coming forward and offering their instructions free of charge; we have had very interesting skirmishes with teachers on such matters as fringe benefits.

So the question raised here is: what is the special thing that requires this levy to be placed exclusively on writers?

I think the special thing is that writers speak to the human spirit. They are the conscience and the recorders of our society. Their works should be seen by the children. We want them to be and feel that they should be. But if you encroach on the already precarious livelihood of our poets, our most gifted writers, their wood notes may turn sour. Or worse, they may be forced into kinds of employment which would in fact deprive them of their own free voices.

So, though mention has been made of the possibility of compromise on the difficult issues in this bill, I would urge you with all earnestness to reject compromise on this point, and to hold the bill as it now stands, so that we will not run the risk, while we make teaching easier today, of complicating and possibly stultifying our literary heritage tomorrow. Thank you very much.

Mr. STOUT. Gentlemen, Mr. Irwin Karp, the counsel of the Authors League and its two guilds.

STATEMENT OF IRWIN KARP ON BEHALF OF AUTHORS LEAGUE OF AMERICA

Mr. KARP. Mr. Chairman, I would like to address myself briefly to some of the major provisions of the revision bill.

The Authors League generally finds acceptable and supports the provisions of section 109. It spells out exemptions under which educational and other nonprofit uses may be made of certain types of copyrighted works. In principle we think the four subdivisions of the section are acceptable. We do believe that certain language clarifications and modifications are in order and these are described in two joint memorandums which have been submitted to the Register and I believe will be filed with the committee; memorandums subscribed to by the Authors League, other authors organizations, the American Book Publishers Council, and the American Textbook Publishers Council. I will not burden you at this time with the technical details of the proposed clarifications.

We find acceptable and we wholeheartedly support the revision bill's proposals for dealing with the use of television in teaching. We think the provision for the use of certain types of copyrighted materials on educational broadcasting intended primarily for classroom teaching are acceptable. We think on the other hand that the revision bill quite properly ends the exception which permits the use of materials on public nonprofit broadcasting. This area of broadcasting is in many respects indiscernible from commercial broadcasting and certainly its effects on the author and the extent to which it deprives him of income do not, we believe, entitle it to this exception.

We also believe that the provisions of the bill concerning "fair use" are the only sensible way of dealing with this problem. Other speakers this morning pointed out to you that the doctrine of fair use is a flexible doctrine developed by courts over the last 150 years, that it is admirably

suited to dealing with the different fact situations that arise and that it would be very difficult and probably stifling to both authors, publishers and users to attempt to spell out rigid rules in the statute. Sooner or later those rigid rules will be subject to further judicial interpretation compounding the confusion.

Ôn the manufacturing clause let us point out that the Authors League has over the years urged the abolition of this clause. As you may know, it is directed primarily at authors and the penalty by which this clause is enforced, where books are imported into this country, is the total forfeiture of the author's copyright. The author and his copyright are the hostages to the manufacturing clause. It is a clause that discriminates only against American authors. It does not apply to any other author in the world whether he writes in English or not, he is not subject to its provision.

Now we think that some of the modifications proposed in the revision bill will ameliorate the hardships of the clause. We think that, even as rewritten, other changes should be made. But we have joined with the book publishers and the book manufacturers in seeking to work out an accord on the clause.

These conversations will continue. Therefore, we would not at this time attempt to make specific proposals. If at the time the clause is taken up by the committee we have, unfortunately, been unable to work out an accord then we will be more specific in our objections to those provisions of the bill that still leave it something of a hardship. (Subsequently, Mr. Karp submitted the following:)

STATEMENT OF THE AUTHORS LEAGUE OF AMERICA ON THE MANUFACTURING CLAUSE (SEC. 601) OF THE COPYRIGHT REVISION BILL (H.R. 4347)

The Authors League of America, Inc., a national society of professional writers and dramatists, respectfully submits this statement of its views on the manufacturing clause (sec. 601) of the copyright revision bill, and requests that it be incorporated in the record of the hearings.

Section 601 of the revision bill amends the present manufacturing clause and eliminates some of the severe penalties it inflicts, without justification, on American authors. However, if it is to be retained, we believe that further changes are required. But it is our opinion that there is no excuse for the manufacturing clause. It should be entirely eliminated from the act. Therefore, we would like to state the reasons for its outright repeal before discussing revisions of section 601.

REPEAL OF THE CLAUSE

The manufacturing clause is unfair and discriminatory. It imposes upon some American authors the Draconian penalty of foreiture of copyright as the means of preventing copies of their works from being manufactured abroad. If more than 1,500 copies of an American author's book are imported, he loses his copyright. Anyone may appropriate his property-reprint and sell his book without his consent and without paying him.

The clause is unfair for these reasons:

1. It relies upon an improper and immoral act as a means of enforcing its import restrictions--the unauthorized appropriation of an author's book by others. The same conduct would be infringement if the book had been written by a foreign author; it would be infringement if the book had been published here. The clause simply legitimatizes the act of literary poaching; it deputizes the piratical publisher to enforce its provisions.

52-380-66-pt. 1-8

« iepriekšējāTurpināt »