Page:Copyright Law Revision (Senate Report No. 94-473).djvu/146

 and, where the offense is repeated, the defendant may be find up to $10,000 or imprisoned up to 3 years, or both.

Section 506(a) contains a special provision applying to any person who infringes willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage the copyright in a sound recording or a motion picture. For the first such offense a person shall be fined not more than $25,000 or imprisoned for not more than 3 years, or both. For any subsequent offense a person shall be fined not more than $50,000 or imprisoned not more than 7 years or both.

Section 507, which is substantially identical with section 115 of the present law, establishes a 3-year statute of limitations for both criminal proceedings and civil actions. The language of this section, which was adopted by the act of September 7, 1957 (71 Stat. 633), represents a reconciliation of views, and has therefore been left unaltered. Section 508, which corresponds to some extent with a provision in the patent law (35 U.S.C. sec. 290), is intended to establish a method for notifying the Copyright Office and the public of the filing and disposition of copyright cases. The clerks of the Federal courts are to notify the Copyright Office of the filing of any copyright actions and of their final disposition, and the Copyright Office is to make these notifications a part of its public records.

The requirement in general

A chronic problem in efforts to revise the copyright statute for the past 75 years has been the need to reconcile the interests of the American printing industry with those of authors and other copyright owners. The scope and impact of the “manufacturing clause,” which came into the copyright law as a compromise in 1891, have been gradually narrowed by successive amendments. The basis problem is still unresolved.

Under the present statute, with many exceptions and qualifications, a book or periodical in the English language must be manufactured in the United States in order to receive full coypright protection. Failure to comply with any of the complicated requirements can result in complete loss of protection. Today the main efforts of the manufacturing requirements are on works by American authors.

The first and most important question here is whether the manufacturing requirement should be retained in the statute in any form. The Register of Copyrights, whose 1961 Report had recommended outright repeal, made clear that he still favors this result in principle; however, if economic factors have not changed sufficiently to permit dropping the requirement entirely, he urged that it be “substantially narrowed so that rights are not destroyed in situations where the book manufacturing industry has no real need of protection.” Beginning in 1965, serious efforts at compromising the issue were made by various interests, and these appear to have been successful.

The principal arguments for elimination of the manufacturing requirement can be summarized as follows:


 * 1. The manufacturing clause originated as a response to a historical situation that no longer exists. Its requirements have