Page:H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476 (1976) Page 164.djvu

 Section 507, which is substantially identical with section 115 of the present law, establishes a three-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. 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.

Section 509(b) specifies a new discretionary remedy for alteration of programming by cable systems in violation of section 111(c)(3): the court in such cases may decree that, “for a period not to exceed thirty days, the cable system shall be deprived of the benefit of a compulsory license for one or more distant signals carried by such cable system.” The term “distant signals” in this provision is intended to have a meaning consistent with the definition of “distant signal equivalent” in section 111.

Under section 509(a), four types of plaintiffs are entitled to bring an action in cases of alteration of programming by cable systems in violation of section 111(c)(3). For regular copyright owners and local broadcaster-licensees, the full battery of remedies for infringement would be available. The two new classes of potential plaintiffs under section 501(d)—the distant-signal transmitter and other local stations—would be limited to the following remedies: (i) discretionary injunctions; (ii) discretionary costs and attorney’s feees; (iii) any actual damages the plaintiff can prove were attributable to the act of altering program content; and (iv) the new discretionary remedy of suspension of compulsory licensing.

The requirement in general

A chronic problem in efforts to revise the copyright statute for the past 85 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.

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 copyright protection. Failure to comply with any of the complicated requirements can result in complete loss of protection. Today the main effects 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. Beginning in 1965, serious efforts at compromising the issue were made by various interests aimed at substantially narrowing the scope of the requirement, and these efforts produced the version of section 601 adopted by the Senate when it passed S. 22.