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signals by cable, microwave and satellite, almost without limit as to distance. The are governed, as they should be, by the Federal Communications Commission and other regulatory and franchising agencies but are restricted very little by technological limitations. Cable now can, and does, transmit signals far beyond the local market area. In the bill we refer to these as “distant signals”. Admittedly they serve the public interest.
The copyright laws should not limit the extent to which cable serves the public interest. Although the Founding Fathers could not contemplate the size of the geographical distribution of the audience which can be reached by cable they certainly did not contemplate an arbitrary limitation on either of those factors. And it should be remembered that they delegated to the Congress the power to regulate copyright in order “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts”.
Cable has a yet unrealized capability to broaden our horizons and to bring education, information and entertainment to people everywhere. Surely this is in the public interest and for the public benefit. The copyright laws should not be used to restrict or impair that flow of knowledge. To the extent that regulation is necessary it can be accomplished through the FCC and through state and local utility commissions and similar bodies. Such regulation is not the proper role of the copyright laws.
Remembering that copyright is a property right we must also remember that the owner cannot be deprived of his property without due process of law nor can it be taken for public use without just compensation. This is where the most difficult problems arose in working out the copyright bill. We wished to permit and encourage the broader dissemination of communications through cable while being fair and equitable to the owners and users of copyrighted materials and at the same time protecting the public interest. The committee process is now complete and the committee has presented a bill which gives cable a compulsory license to intercept and re-transmit (secondarily transmit) television and radio broadcasts. It recognizes the passive, “antenna”, role of cable in secondary transmissions within the local market area, and imposes no liability to pay copyright royalties for those “local” transmissions. The bill, however, recognizes that when cable secondarily transmits signals to a place beyond the local market area, then it is doing something extra, it is adding something which would not exist but for the role of the cable system. This something extra, which is distant signal transmitting, impinges upon the property rights of the copyright owner who is thereby, to some extent, deprived of his property and denied the exclusive right to his property which is guaranteed by the Constitution and our laws and he is entitled to just compensation. This “something extra” could be considered as a “performance”, or as an alternative to a performance.
The bill which we report therefore imposes a schedule of royalty charges upon the secondary transmission of distant signals. The charges which are imposed, and the manner of their imposition, is set forth in detail in the body of the committee report; so is the method by which they are to be distributed to the copyright owners. Provision is made for future adjustments to the royalty schedules because the setting of royalties is unduly burdensome for a legislative body and should not be one of the problems of the Congress.
