House Judiciary's Planned California Roundtables Likely To Include Wider Range of Copyright Issues
House Judiciary Committee leaders said Tuesday that the committee is planning to hold two roundtable meetings next month in California as part of its ongoing Copyright Act review. House Judiciary is currently planning a Nov. 9 roundtable in Silicon Valley and a Nov. 10 roundtable in Los Angeles, said committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and ranking member John Conyers, D-Mich. The meetings would follow up on House Judiciary’s Nashville copyright roundtable in late September, which focused on music licensing issues (see 1509220055). “We look forward to continuing the productive dialog that we had in Nashville,” said Goodlatte and Conyers in a joint statement. House Judiciary’s California meetings are likely to attract a wider variety of copyright stakeholders than the music-centric Nashville roundtable, but stakeholders told us that they anticipate that music licensing issues will remain an important focus even amid copyright issues affecting the film and TV industries.
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The Los Angeles and Silicon Valley roundtables are likely to include copyright stakeholders from a far wider variety of industries than the Nashville meeting given that Los Angeles is a hub for the film, TV and music industries, while Silicon Valley is the headquarters for many top U.S. tech firms, an industry lobbyist said. Los Angeles has “very mature entertainment industries” across a wide range of media, so “it’s a pretty high certainty that there’s going to be folks outside of the music industry, but there’ll still be music people in the room,” said Future of Music CEO Casey Rae.
It’s unclear the extent to which either meeting will attract top California-based companies given that many of those firms already have a lobbying presence on Capitol Hill and House Judiciary’s copyright “listening tour” is targeted at gathering feedback from stakeholders who don’t have a Washington presence, the lobbyist said. However, the lobbyist noted that the Internet Association (IA), which includes Amazon, Facebook and Google as members, had urged House Judiciary to hold a Silicon Valley roundtable as part of its tour (see 1509160056). IA didn’t comment.
The Authors Alliance is interested in participating in the Silicon Valley meeting but like many other stakeholders hasn’t committed to joining the meeting yet, said Pam Samuelson, a member of the group’s board of directors and co-director of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law’s Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. The Content Creators Coalition is also very interested in participating in both California meetings, but hasn’t committed to coordinating participation by its members until further details are set, said Executive Director Jeffrey Boxer. Future of Music will continue to monitor House Judiciary’s roundtables as they occur and it’s likely that several of the group’s members will participate at the California meetings, though not directly on FoM's behalf, Rae said.
Stakeholders “don’t know what the legislative agenda is yet,” though it’s likely that the future placement of the Copyright Office and the CO’s extended collective licensing proposal are likely to get attention, Samuelson said. “I know things like ISP liability have been the subject of much discussion but I don’t get the sense that there’s a great appetite for reopening that particular can of worms. I think [House Judiciary] wouldn’t have held so many hearings if it didn’t want to do something legislatively so it will be interesting to see if that’s on music licensing or fair use issues.”
It’s difficult to judge how much music-related copyright issues will factor into the Los Angeles meeting’s agenda because of the wider range of stakeholders likely to be present, Rae said. “Nashville is very much a music city and also it is home base for a lot of professional songwriters, so that’s why there was so much focus on songwriter royalties and the statutory framework for those royalties,” Rae said. Los Angeles “could be about anything, but I’d expect [Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)] notice-and-takedown and safe harbor issues will come up," he said. "Those are issues that rightsholders in all sectors have something to say about.” Notice-and-takedown and safe harbor could also factor into the Silicon Valley roundtable “because developers and tech folks likely feel strongly that safe harbors are necessary for them to launch their products,” said Rae. DMCA issues are “extremely important to us and need to be discussed, as do many other music-related issues, Boxer said. Compensation transparency issues also need to factor into House Judiciary’s roundtables, along with compensation equality between songwriters and performers, he said.