This morning we are to hear the Authors' League of America. Who for the Authors' League will be the spokesman and present the witnesses?

Mr. Buck. Mr. Chairman, I would first like to present the distinguished American writer, Mr. Elmer Davis, the vice president of the Authors' League of America.

Mr. LANHAM. Mr. Davis.

STATEMENT OF ELMER DAVIS, VICE PRESIDENT, AUTHORS'

LEAGUE OF AMERICA

Mr. DAVIS. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, we appreciate the courtesy of hearings accorded us by your committee, which contrast very favorably with the treatment we received in what, following the English practice, I might term "another place", on the other side of the Hill.

The Authors' League of America is an organization of about 4,000 members, composed of working authors, the people who work at it for a living. We include practically all the professional authors of the United States, and there is no other organization which in any way approaches our scope. We are substantially the labor union of the authors. We also go in for certain things that are perhaps beyond the purview of the ordinary labor union, but that is because of the peculiar nature of our occupation. It is a business, it is a trade, but it has some other aspects, too, which have always been recognized by Government authorities and by the Constitution of the United States.

We take action on certain matters, or at least, we express our opinion-we cannot take action-on certain matters such as censorship and other things of the sort which seem to restrict the rights of authorship. But primarily we are a labor union, and the only one in our field.

We have always been interested in copyright, very naturally. The Constitution guarantees to the author the protection of his works and we, I think, have a special and paramount interest in copyright other than that of some of these other interests who appear before your committee, because we are the producers of the raw material, we and the composers whom Mr. Buck represents.

We have been stigmatized, I believe, in some of the arguments in connection with this bill, as producers who are seeking to oppress the consumers.

Gentlemen, we are producers in the same sense as a farmer is a producer. We turn out the raw material which somebody else has to get to market. We cannot do without the people who get it to market and they cannot do without us. The question is how the profits, if any, that flow from this arrangement are going to be divided.

We are concerned chiefly, I take it, this morning with the Duffy bill, which has passed the other House and I presume has the prior consideration of your committee. Speaking as producers, we do not think much of the Duffy bill. We feel about it very much as a farmer would feel if he saw a bill proposed ostensibly for farm relief and it turned out to be for the relief of the millers and the packing houses.

We have long been interested in copyright and are not satisfied with the present law. There is no question that the Duffy bill in one or two respects is an improvement, but take it net, with its advantages and its draw-backs, and there is certainly nothing in it which would appeal to any author, however much there may be which would appeal to some of the middlemen who sell our goods for us to the public. You have heard of the protection of the consumer, gentlemen. The consumer that this bill seeks to protect is not the man who reads a book or sees a motion picture or listens to a radio broadcast. It is the fellow that sells the book or exhibits the motion picture or broadcasts the material over the radio.

There are unquestionably one or two good points from our point of view in this Duffy bill. We have received one or two of the things which we wanted. On the other hand, there has been written into the bill practically every concession that we have ever made in order to get some other things which we wanted and did not get and do not get in this bill. Some of the good points of the bill, for example, are that it permits divisible copyright; that is to say, you can sell one right in a story to one purchaser and another right to another; that is to say, you can sell separately to the magazine editor and to the book publisher, instead of selling each one in turn your whole copyright for the time being, as it is now. That is a distinct advantage.

There is the further advantage that this bill provides for taking us into the International Copyright Union and subscribing to the Berne Convention. I am sorry to say that that advantage now is much more theoretical than real. There was a time when we were heartily in favor of it, because it seemed to promise some real advantages. We are in favor of it still, but we do not think it amounts to much.

There are two or three very distinguished men of letters, very highminded and completely disinterested men of letters, who regard that as the paramount issue. Dr. Robert Underwood Johnson and Dr. Henry Seidel Canby are both very high-minded men, and they think that the great question of taking us into the International Copyright Union is paramount over everything else. There is no question that these men are completely sincere and disinterested, and we would not wish to criticize them in any way. But, Mr. Chairman, I would point out that both Dr. Underwood Johnson and Dr. Henry Seidel Canby have jobs with salaries attached; that is the way they make their living. We represent the authors, who have to make their living by selling their stuff.

From that point of view the Berne Convention is not worth very much just now. It is all right, it is all very well, it is a good thing to get into, but its effects have been limited in a number of ways. There are several countries in the world which will not let you take money out. For instance, if an American author should sell his book in those countries under the protection of a copyright granted by the Berne Convention, he would have to go to those countries to spend the money. One of them is Australia. It is a long way to go, and you would have to pile up a lot of money in Australia before you got enough to pay yourself for a trip there.

There are other disadvantages, such as the use of quotas for American motion pictures in foreign countries, which very greatly limit the

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advantages of the Berne Convention not only to American authors but in this instance also to the distributors, to the motion-picture producers, and to the American book publishers.

The fact is that just at present the foreign market for the American author is not worth very much, owing to circumstances over which no American can exert any control. Consequently, while we would like to get into the Berne Convention and get a little protection in our present negligible foreign market, we do not like to see large parts of our domestic market given away in order to get us into the Berne Convention.

It seems to us that the Duffy bill insofar as any logic can be discerned in its somewhat contradictory and confused provisions to some extent sells the American author "down the river" for the benefit of the middleman, the producers of motion pictures, radio, and the magazines. It is no so bad as it was when it was originally introduced in the Senate. An amendment that was put on there has taken out some of the curse, but there is plenty of curse left.

I will state only one or two of the points, on which some of our colleagues will speak more fully.

There is, for example, a great deal in this bill about the protection of the innocent infringer of copyright. Certainly none of us wants to work any hardship on the innocent infringer of copyright, but, gentlemen, you should not call that a copyright bill; you should call it a conservation bill. It has been our experience that the innocent infringer is one of the rarest forms of wildlife in the United States.

Once in a while you do get an innocent infringer. There is one particular instance which is fully provided for in this bill, that of the printer who may become involved in an infringement of copyright because somebody steals a story and gives it to the printer to print. We fully concur with the provisions of this bill for the protection of the printer in that case. It is not his fault. Once in a very long while you have an innocent infringer in other respects, but very rarely.

It seems to me that the protection thrown about the innocent infringer in this bill is so widespread in some cases, so loosely phrased, that it will perhaps operate to protect his very much more numerous colleague, the guilty infringer.

There is a further point in this bill which is of some material disadvantage to us, and which I am sure all of us feel very much more as a moral disadvantage, frankly, as a slap in the face at all American authors. If you will bear with me while I cite one or two passages in this bill I will give the exact words of the bill. It is a discrimination in favor of foreign authors.

It is provided in this bill on page 9, lines 11 to 16, as follows [reading]:

That the author or other person entitled thereto by this Act may secure copyright for his work by publication thereof with the notice of copyright required by this Act

And so on.

Over on the next page, at the top of page 11, it is provided that copyright may also be had of any work of an author which has not

been published upon the deposit with claim of copyright of one complete copy of such work, and so on.

That is a good thing, too. It gives you a copyright protection on an unpublished work, provided you send a copy of it in and duly register it.

But now look back at page 8, lines 7 to 15, dealing with our joining the Copyright Union and the Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. [Reading:]

Authors within the jurisdiction of any foreign country that is now or may hereafter be a party to the Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, whether their works are unpublished or published for the first time in one of the countries parties to said convention, shall have all the rights now accorded or which may hereafter be accorded by law to nationals of the United States.

That is all right; there is no objection to that. [Reading:]

And the enjoyment and the exercise of such rights shall not be subject to any formality.

Gentlemen, I am not a lawyer. I am no expert on legal phraseology. But if that means what it says it means simply this; that an American author who produces a work can get it copyrighted in two ways: By having it published with a notice of copyright or by sending a copy of his manuscript down and going through certain formalities. But the foreigner can get all those rights and his enjoyment of those rights is not subject to any formality.

In other words, if an English author sits down and pounds at his typewriter and pushes out a novel, by the time he finishes typing the last page of the novel, if this means anything, it seems to me that English author has at that moment automatically got a copyright in the United States for his work.

The American author who does the same thing has not. He has to go through certain formalities.

It may be said that this bill gives Americans in forty-odd foreign countries, all the members of the International Copyright Union, in each of those countries all the rights that are possessed by any native authors. That is fine. It also gives to foreigners all the rights possessed in this country by American authors. That is fine, and there is no objection to that. But if I understand this bill correctly, it gives foreigners more rights in this country than are enjoyed by American authors. So long as we get equal rights with natives of foreign countries in foreign countries I do not see why we should not get equal rights in our own.

There are possibilities of material damage in the discrimination there. There are much graver possibilities of call it loss of selfesteem, if you like, gentlemen. But I do not see any reason why our own country should discriminate against us in favor of foreigners. None of us sees it. We do not like it very much. We hope that the Congress will be impelled to remove that discrimination. That is a general statement of our case. I shall call on various people to present different aspects of it. The first one on whom I shall call is George Creel.

STATEMENT OF GEORGE CREEL, MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, AUTHORS' LEAGUE OF AMERICA

Mr. CREEL. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, my name is George Creel. I have been a member of the executive committee of the Authors' League for 20 years.

Mr. Davis has touched upon the changed attitude of the Authors' League with respect to the adherence to the Bern Convention. I purpose to give the reasons for that change and explain them in some detail.

As all of you gentlemen know, for years we have urged adherence to the Bern Convention, believing that its principles represent the one sound and just copyright theory.

A reasonable reciprocity is the very essence of these principles. Adhering countries agree that if an author complies with the copyright law of his own country he shall secure copyright protection in each of the other countries. The convention also prescribes that certain minimum basic rights must be granted by each signatory country to the authors of every country.

The change in the position of the Authors' League is not due to any loss of faith in these principles, but proceeds entirely from Germany's recent and flagrant violations of these principles. Specifi cally and openly Germany has repudiated its obligations under the treaty, and made plain declaration of intent to continue this repudiation. By a series of legal decisions, the Hitler government has served notice on the world that people of certain racial groups, specifically the Jewish, have no rights that Germany will enforce or has any intention of respecting.

Certain Nuremberg decrees apply explicitly to authors and constitute a plain denial of rights supposedly guaranteed under the Bern Convention. First, all media of propaganda, including radio, book publishing, newspaper publishing, magazine publishing, drama, and motion pictures were put into the hands of organizations controlled entirely by so-called Aryans. This, of course, excluded people of Jewish descent.

Second, there was a recent court decision where a sculptor, a Polish Jew, brought suit against a German for use of his work without permission. He proved his case beyond all cavil, but the court held that when a non-Aryan went into court against an Aryan, no matter how strongly the fundamental law favored the rights of the nonAryan, the current and dominant German philosophy compelled judgment for the Aryan.

A third decree provided that foreign non-Aryans should have no greater rights in Germany than citizen non-Aryans. This means that if the United States adheres to the Bern Convention, Christian members might have the privilege of copyright in Germany, but Jewish and Negro writers could not and would not receive the protection promised by solemn treaty.

A fourth decree stated that foreign Jews shall have the same status and shall be treated in the same manner as German Jews. Since all media for use of an author's work in Germany are controlled by Aryans, it follows that only Aryans would have any opportunity to use an author's work. Consequently, no American Jew, if the United States adheres to the treaty, could enforce any rights in Germany against the piracy of an Aryan.