Page:H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476 (1976) Page 166.djvu

 industry, and catch manufacturers, whose labor costs and break-even points are extremely high, in a cost-price squeeze at a time when expenditures for new equipment have reduced profits to a minimum.

3. The high ratio of exports to imports could change very quickly without a manufacturing requirement. Repeal would add to the balance-of-payments deficit since foreign publishers never manufacture here. The U.S. publishing industry has large investments abroad, and attacks on the manufacturing clause by foreign publishers, show a keen anticipation for new business. The book publishers arguments that repeal would have no real economic impact are contradicted by their arguments that the manufacturing requirement is stifling scholarship and crippling publishing; their own figures show a 250 percent rise in English-language book imports in 10 years.

After carefully weighing these arguments, the Committee concludes that there is no justification on principle for a manufacturing requrement in the copyright statute, and although there may have been some economic justification for it at one time, that justification no longer exists. While it is true that section 601 represents a substantial liberalization and that it would remove many of the inequities of the present manufacturing requirement, retention of a provision of this sort in a copyright law can continue to be justified. The Committee believes it cannot.

The Committee recognizes that immediate repeal of the manufacturing requirement might have damaging effects in some of the U.S. printing industry. It has therefore amended section 601 to retain the liberalized requirement through the end of 1980, but to repeal it definitively as of January 1, 1981. It also adopted an amendment further ameliorating the effect of this temporary legislation on individual American authors.

In view of this decision, the detailed discussion of section 601 that follows will cease to be of significance after 1980.

Works subject to the manufacturing requirement

The scope of the manufacturing requirement, as set out in subsections (a) and (b) of section 601, is considerably more limited than that of present law. The requirements apply to “a work consisting preponderantly of nondramatic literary material that is in the English language and is protected under this title,” and would thus not extend to: dramatic, musical, pictoral, or graphic works; foreign-language, bilingual, or multilingual works; public domain material; or works consisting preponderantly of material that is not subject to the manufacturing requirement.

The term “literary material” does not connote any criterion of literary merit or qualitative value; it includes catalogs, directories and “similar materials.”

A work containing “nondramatic literary material that is in the English language and is protected under this title,” and also containing dramatic, musical, pictorial, graphic, foreign-language, public domain, or other material that is not subject to the manufacturing requirement, or any combination of these, is not considered to consist “preponderantly” of the copyright-protected nondramatic English-language literary material unless such material exceeds the exempted material in importance. Thus, where the literary material in a work consists merely of a foreword or preface, and captions, headings, or