and we would lose, naturally, in royalties until Congress amended the law. Mr. FENNING. I speak from the point of one who has studied that clause of the Constitution and its interpretation, and that provision has been specifically stated in the act as it stands at present, involving that interpretation that might be put upon it. The only way substantially is to pass the bill before you as it is at the present time. With respect to the compulsory license in a patent, they were popular throughout the world. They are dropping out gradually. There's one thing we may suggest, that it has operated so that a man could invent something or if a man should write something, he may be granted for a period the right to control that individual thing. But ethically and economically I am satisfied that when a man produces something new, that he should have absolutely the complete, exclusive control of that thing, as the Constitution says. It is reasonable, it is ethical, it is just-for a limited time, and that is all that is being done. If there are some of them-if they say that when a man writes a popular song he blocks somebody else ever getting the right to use it, if he gets the exclusive use, but do not say that nobody else has the right to use it for 28 years, and then surrender it and say everybody has a right to use it. I think the situation is that the only appropriate thing to do is to pass the bill as it stands at present; free accessibility is something which is impossible actually to accomplish, and to my mind free accessibility is not a thing which can be considered with respect to industrial and intellectual property. You are dealing here not with something which is out in the field but you are dealing with something which is not in existence until it is born. You are making light of a man simply because he happens to have invested his time and thought in a song rather than into a brick building. You do not say to a man who has a brick building, "You have got to let anybody that wants to occupy that, occupy it for 2 cents," and the Constitutional Convention appreciated that very fact. Mr. SIROVICH. Do you know of any thing that is subject to the copyright law that is universally accessible in it outside of music? Mr. Buck. I do not know of any place in the field of copyright. Mr. SIROVICH, I mean in our country. Mr. Buck. If anybody has been discrinimated against like the man that happens to write a song, that is one point before the committee. That is why the bill in its present form is before you. Mr. SIROVICH. The constitutionality of the question was never raised. Mr. BUCK. Never. We have been coming here for years. Mr. Buck. No, it has not. We have been coming here for years in an attempt to correct the act of 1909. That is what brings us here to-day. Mr. ROSENTHAL. May I submit a draft of the accessibility clause? The CHAIRMAN. Yes. Mr. MEIXELL. May I ask if the brief is submitted we may have copy of it? Mr. ROSENTHAL. I am not submitting a brief. The CHAIRMAN. They are submitting no brief. They are only submitting the text of an amendment giving accessibility. Mr. Buck. And leave it to the committee to decide. The same thing was presented to Colonel Donovan. The CHAIRMAN. You have a copy of it? Mr. Buck. It was presented to them and then they went into a huddle on it and they answered it by this brief. The CHAIRMAN. If no one else has anything to say the committee will adjourn. (Thereupon, at 11.30 o'clock, a. m., the committee adjourned.) |