Industry & Advocacy News
April 30, 2013
Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chair of the House Judiciary Committee, announced last Wednesday that the committee “will hold a comprehensive series of hearings on U.S. copyright law in the months ahead. The goal of these hearings will be to determine whether the laws are still working in the digital age.”
Goodlatte made his remarks at the World Intellectual Property Day celebration at the Library of Congress, and invited interested parties to submit their views to the Judiciary Committee. His full statement is here.
Goodlatte noted that Maria Pallante, Register of Copyrights, had called for such a comprehensive review leading to “the next great copyright act” in testimony on March 20th. In her prepared statement, Pallante said that “authors do not have effective protections, good faith businesses do not have clear roadmaps, courts do not have sufficient direction, and consumers and other private citizens are increasingly frustrated.”
In her March 20th testimony, Pallante made clear her view that “the issues of authors are intertwined with the interests of the public.” Authors, Pallante said,
are not a counterweight to the public interest but instead are at the very center of the equation. In the words of the Supreme Court, “[t]he immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an ‘author’s’ creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.” Congress has a duty to keep authors in its mind’s eye, including songwriters, book authors, filmmakers, photographers, and visual artists. A law that does not provide for authors would be illogical — hardly a copyright law at all.
Pallante pointed out, however, that the last major overhaul of U.S. copyright law, the 1976 Copyright Act, took two decades to negotiate. We expect to be hearing much more about this in the months ahead.
