House Judiciary Closes Copyright Review Hearings With Focus on CO Restructuring
Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante urged the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday to detach the Copyright Office from the Library of Congress and make it an independent agency, saying legislators should move this Congress to decide how to restructure the CO. Pallante has backed making the CO an independent agency and that suggestion received backing from many members of House Judiciary during a Feb. 26 committee hearing (see 1502260057). House Judiciary ranking member John Conyers, D-Mich., billed Wednesday's session as the committee's final hearing on its two-year-long Copyright Act review. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said the committee will now reach out to all copyright stakeholders on the myriad issues the Copyright Act review identified.
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Issues of CO restructuring dominated the hearing Wednesday. Pallante also highlighted specific copyright issues that she believed should be committee priorities. Pallante backed the Fair Play Fair Pay Act (HR-1733), saying it's “an excellent legislative framework” for equalizing performance royalties across all media. The bill, introduced earlier this month (see 1504130056), would require most terrestrial radio stations to begin paying performance royalties. It also updates royalty payment requirements for digital and satellite broadcasters. The CO backed terrestrial performance royalties in its February music licensing study (see 1502050055), and Pallante said Wednesday that the U.S.'s lack of a terrestrial royalty requirement put it “out of step” with other industrialized nations.
NAB was among the opponents of terrestrial royalties that said Wednesday that it was forming the Music. Innovation. Consumers. (MIC) Coalition to oppose HR-1733 and other bills to update music royalties. The U.S. music industry “is the most successful in the world, aided in part by intellectual property laws that do not tilt in favor of record labels over the millions of daily listeners who consume music,” NAB President Gordon Smith said in a news release. Amazon, CEA, the Digital Media Association and Google are among the MIC Coalition's other founding members. The coalition “looks like little more than some of the world's biggest and wealthiest corporations -- and the trade associations they fund -- hiding behind a new website and a gauzy mission statement as they continue their campaign to deny fair pay to working musicians, to stiff artists on AM/FM radio, and to ignore the pleas of elderly performers seeking their due,” said musicFIRST Executive Director Ted Kalo in a statement.
Pallante backed proposals to make unauthorized Internet streaming a felony offense, which she said would align it with penalties for other forms of copyright infringement. Pallante also backed codifying resale royalties for visual art, creating an alternate tribunal for small copyright claims, creating a framework for the use of orphan works and updating exemptions for libraries and the blind. Pallante said the regulatory presumption for DMCA Section 1201 rulemakings needs to shift so exemption requests are presumed to be renewed if there isn't opposition. However, Section 1201 requires further review before Congress takes legislative action, she said. A final round of comments on the CO's Section 1201 review are due Friday.
An independent CO is preferable to simply shifting it from being a branch of the Library of Congress to being a branch of the Department of Commerce or another agency, because it would let the CO continue to provide impartial copyright advice to Congress and the White House, Pallante said. IP Subcommittee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., pressed Pallante on when House Judiciary would see a solid proposal from CO on how it would function as an independent agency, saying CO has repeatedly pressed for further studies on restructuring the office.
An independent CO would also be better able to deal with significant IT deficiencies it faces, Pallante said. A GAO study released in March (see 1503310046) found severe deficiencies in the Library of Congress's IT program, which are reflected in deficiencies in CO's policies, Pallante said. The CO needs its staff to become more data and tech-savvy, and a break away from the Library of Congress will let the office become more “innovative,” Pallante said.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said she believed the CO should be completely funded through copyright-related fees, comparing it to the Patent and Trademark Office, which is funded entirely on patent fees. There's “no reason” why taxpayers should be funding CO if PTO is able to function entirely off its own fees, Lofgren said. Pallante said CO draws 66 percent of its funding from copyright-related fees. She also said CO's funding is already “cut to the bone” because of government-wide cuts, which make it difficult for the office to conduct the “complex” work it was created to undertake.