Page:Copyright Law Revision (Senate Report No. 94-473).djvu/153

 solving problems that have arisen under the present statute. Since the Bureau of Customs is often in no position to make determinations as to whether particular articles are “piratical,” section 603(b) would permit the Customs regulations to require the person seeking exclusion either to obtain a court order enjoining importation, or to furnish proof of his claim and to post bond.

Chapter 7, entitled “Copyright Office,” sets forth the housekeeping provisions of the bill. Aside from the provisions on retention of deposits, catalogs, and fees, these sections appear to present no problems of content or interpretation requiring comment here.

Retention, and disposition of deposited articles

A recurring problem in the administration of the copyright law has been the need to reconcile the storage limitations of the Copyright Office with the continued value of deposits in identifying copyrighted works. Aside from its indisputable utility to future historians and scholars, a substantially complete collection of both published and unpublished deposits, other than those selected by the Library of Congress, would avoid the many difficulties encountered when copies needed for identification in connection with litigation or other purposes have been destroyed. The basic policy behind section 704 is that copyrighted deposits should be retained as lone as possible, but that the Register of Copyrights and the Librarian of Congress should be empowered to dispose of them under appropriate safeguards when they decide that it has become necessary to do so.

Under subsection (a) of section 704, any copy, phonorecord, or identifying material deposited for registration, whether registered or not, becomes “the property of the United States.” This means that the copyright owner or person who made the deposit cannot demand its return as a matter of right, even in rejection cases, although the provisions of section 407 and 408 are flexible enough to allow for special arrangements in exceptional cases. On the other hand, Government ownership of deposited articles under section 704(a) carries with it no privileges under the copyright itself; use of a deposited article in violation of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights would be infrinmgement.

With respect to published works, section 704(b) makes all deposits available to the Library of Congress “for its collections, or for exchange or transfer to any other library”; where the work is unpublished, the Library is authorized to select the deposit for its own collections, but not for transfer outside the Library. Motion picture producers have expressed some concern lest the right to transfer copies of works, such as motion pictures, that have been published under rental, lease, or loan arrangements, might lead to abuse. However, the Library of Congress has not knowingly transferred works of this sort to other libraries in the past, and there is no reason to expect it to do so in the future.

For deposits not selected by the Library, subsection (c) provides that they, or “identifying portions or reproductions of them,” are to be