Page:Copyright Law Revision (Senate Report No. 94-473).djvu/50

 these measures. In the 81st Congress Senator Philip A. Hart introduced a similar bill, S. 1774. The substance of that bill has been incorporated as Title II of this legislation.

An analysis and discussion of the provisions of S. 22, as amended, follows:

The significant definitions in this section will be mentioned or summarized in connection with the provisions to which they are most relevant.

“Original works of authorship”

The two fundamental criteria of copyright protection—originality and fixation in tangible form—are restated in the first sentence of this cornerstone provision. The phrase “original works of authorship,” which is purposely left undefined, is intended to incorporate without change the standard of originality established by the courts under the present copyright statute. This standard does not include requirements of novelty, ingenuity, or esthetic merit, and there is no intention to enlarge the standard of copyright protection to require them. In using the phrase “original works of authorship,” rather than “all the writings of an author” now in section 2 of the statute, the committee’s purpose is to avoid exhausting the constitutional power of Congress to legislate in this field, and to eliminate the uncertainties arising from the latter phrase. Since the present statutory language is substantially the same as the empowering language of the Constitution, a recurring question has been whether the statutory and the constitutional provisions are coextensive. If so, the courts would be faced with the alternative of holding copyrightable something that Congress clearly did not intend to protect, or of holding constitutionally incapable of copyright something that Congress might one day want to protect. To avoid these equally undesirable results, the courts have indicated that “all the writings of an author” under the present statute is narrower in scope than the “writings” of “authors” referred to in the Constitution. The bill avoids this dilemma by using a different phrase—“original works of authorship”—in characterizing the general subject matter of statutory copyright protection.

The history of copyright law has been one of gradual expansion in the types of works accorded protection, and the subject matter affected by this expansion has fallen into two general categories. In the first, scientific discoveries and technological developments have made possible new forms of creative expression that never existed before. In some of these cases the new expressive forms—electronic music, film-strips, and computer programs, for example—could be regarded as an extension of copyrightable subject matter Congress had already intended to protect, and were thus considered copyrightable from the outset without the need of new legislation. In other cases, such as photographs, sound recordings, and motion pictures, statutory