Hearing Held On Broadband Access

WASHINGTON, D.C.-A major House of Representatives telecommunications policy lawmaker on April 11 warned there is a flaw in the 1996 Telecommunications Act because Congress did not foresee the phenomenal growth of Internet usage and today's burgeoning need for broadband delivery pipes into the then new information highway.
Another lawmaker also voiced concerns that in the rush by companies to distribute and own content on the Internet, including the rapid delivery of data through broadband networks, recording acts could be caught in the squeeze.
Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., chairman of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee, said that as a result of the shortsightedness of the law, a rewrite of the 1934 Communications Act, access to digital broadband network delivery, "the likes of which we have never witnessed," is now only possible for affluent, urban-center customers and is not available to many citizens in rural and poorer urban communities.
While broadband access for all citizens and its benefits to business were common threads in remarks made at the hearing, Rep. Karen McCarthy, D-Mo., an artists' rights advocate whose home Kansas City district has a rich history of jazz and blues music and many current independent artists, asked the first panel of online music and Internet video executives whether the opportunities for broadband could negatively affect recording artists. "What will be the effect on them? Will it create competition for [the ownership of] content? What will we do about copyright? What about "work for hire' matters?"
There was no question-and-answer period after the panel, but after the hearing, Rep. McCarthy said, "Whenever we talk about the Internet and new technology, yes, the record companies are important and their voices are being heard, but those creative voices that create the music that becomes the record, which the recording company then promotes, must be at the table."
Panelist Peter Harter, EMusic.com VP of global policy and standards, referred the rights issues to EMusic chairman Bob Kohn, author of a book on copyright law.
Kohn told Billboard he believes that his and similar online music companies "would benefit" from a repeal of the new work-for-hire law and the re-establishment of now lost author-reversion rights, because they would be interested in renegotiating the rights to recordings at termination hearings in the future.
Kohn said, however, that even if the law were repealed, the issue of who is the author of a sound recording may be complicated, since some lawyers may argue that producers, sidemen, and engineers can claim authors' rights.
"The history has always been that people who contribute to a sound recording are contributing to a collective work," Kohn said. "The Supreme Court [Creative Community for Non-Violence vs.] Reid case says you can't just look at the contract; you have to go to the circumstances of whether or not the artist was an employee [Billboard, Jan. 15]. The lawyers [representing artists] are saying, "Well, this is not a collective work.' The record company can say, "It is a collective work-what about the packaging, the artwork?'
"But in the future," he added, "when everything goes to download, what is the collected work? What if you're doing singles? There's no packaging; there's no collective work anymore; there's just sound recordings. And they're worried. So they went ahead and presumably added this "technical change' to the law to add the [category of] sound recordings.
"If [after a May 25 review of the work-for-hire law], sound recordings were taken out of the law now," added Kohn, "it might show Congress' intention that collective works does not mean sound recordings. And that there is a reversion right. And then the question's going to be, Who are the authors?
"I'm not saying it's good or bad. If it goes back to the authors, there's a lot more people to negotiate with to get back these masters. It's in EMusic's interest, and companies like us, for all these rights to revert back to the original authors," he said.
Reflecting the view of many copyright experts, Koch said, "The issue that hasn't been resolved yet is, Who are the original authors? Is it the artist; or the artist and the producer; or the artist, producer and sidemen, and engineer?"
At the hearing, Tauzin said that many citizens today are not set up to receive broadband delivery and are only able to get information via the Internet on outmoded "voice" telephone lines and cable infrastructure, "through a squirt gun rather than a fire hose."
Tauzin is the author of a pending bill that would allow the "baby bell" telephone companies to provide Internet broadband service, sidestepping the long-distance restrictions put on them by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
He argues that the Internet is "distinct from telephone and cable service" and that charges would not be based on distance.