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During the 1975 hearings, the Register of Copyrights expressed some concern that an invaluable segment of this country’s musical heritage—in the form of sound recordings—had become inaccesible to musicologists and to others for scholarly purposes. Several of the major recording companies have responded to the Register’s concern by granting blanket licenses to the Library of Congress to permit it to make single copy duplications of sound recordings maintained in the Library’s archives for research purposes. Moreover, steps are being taken to determine the feasibility of additional licensing arrangements as means of satisfying the needs of key regional music libraries across the country. The Register has agreed to report to Congress if further legislative consideration should be undertaken.
Section 114(c) states explicitly that nothing in the provisions of section 114 should be construed to “limit or impair the exclusive right to perform publicly, by means of a phonorecord, any of the works specified by section 106(4).” This principle is already implicit in the bill, but it is restated to avoid the danger of confusion between rights in a sound recording and rights in the musical composition or other work embodied in the recording.
Section 115. Compulsory License for Phonorecords
The provisions of section 1(e) and 101(e) of the present law, establishing a system of compulsory licensing for the making and distribution of phonorecords of copyrighted music, are retained with a number of modifications and clarifications in section 115 of the bill. Under these provisions, which represented a compromise of the most controversial issue of the 1909 act, a musical composition that has been reproduced in phonorecords with the permission of the copyright owner may generally be reproduced in phonorecords by another person, if that person notifies the copyright owner and pays a specified royalty.
The fundamental question of whether to retain the compulsory license or to do away with it altogether was a major issue during earlier stages of the program for general revision of the copyright law. At the hearings it was apparent that the argument on this point had shifted, and the real issue was not whether to retain the compulsory license but how much the royalty rate under it should be. The arguments for and against retention of the compulsory license are outlined at pages 66–67 of this Committee’s 1967 report (H. Rept. No. 83, 90th Cong., 1st Sess.). The Committee’s conclusion on this point remains the same as in 1967: “that a compulsory licensing system is still warranted as a condition for the rights of reproducing and distributing phonorecords of copyrighted music,” but “that the present system is unfair and unnecessarily burdensome on copyright owners, and that the present statutory rate is too low.”
Availability and scope of compulsory license
Subsection (a) of section 115 deals with three doubtful questions under the present law: (1) the nature of the original recording that will make the work available to others for recording under a compulsory license; (2) the nature of the sound recording that can be made under a compulsory license; and (3) the extent to which someone acting under a compulsory license can depart from the work as written or recorded without violating the copyright owner’s right to make an “arrangement” or other derivative work. The first two of these ques-
