Page:H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476 (1976) Page 171.djvu

 the Treasury and the United States Postal Service to make regulations for this purpose, and subsection (c) provides for the disposition of excluded articles.

Subsection (b) of section 603 deals only with the prohibition against importation of “piratical” copies or phonorecords, and is aimed at solving problems that has arisen under the present statute. Since the United States Customs Service 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 administrative and housekeeping provisions of the bill.

Administrative Procedure Act

Under an amendment to section 701 adopted by the Committee, the Copyright Office is made fully subject to the Administrative Procedure Act with one exception: under section 706(b), reproduction and distribution of copyright deposit copies would be made under the Freedom of Information Act only to the extent permitted by the Copyright Office regulations.

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its indisputable utility to future historians and scholars, a susbtantially complete collection of both published and unpublished deposits, other than those selected by the Library of Congress, would avoid the many difficulties encountered when copies needed for identification in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 cpyright deposits should be retained as long 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 Government.” This means that the copyright owner or person who made the depodsit 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 infringement.

With respect to published works, section 704(b) makes all deposits available to the Library of Congress “for its collections, or for exchanges or transfer to any other library”; where the work is unpublished, the Library is authorized to select any deposit for its own