Copyright Act of 1976


The Copyright Act of 1976 is a United States copyright law and remains the primary basis of copyright law in the United States, as amended by several later enacted copyright provisions. The Act spells out the basic rights of copyright holders, codified the doctrine of "fair use", and for most new copyrights adopted a unitary term based on the date of the author's death rather than the prior scheme of fixed initial and renewal terms. It became Public Law number 94-553 on October 19, 1976; most parts of the law went into effect on January 1, 1978.
U.S. Register of Copyrights Barbara Ringer and Congressman Robert Kastenmeier took central roles in drafting the statute.

History and purpose

Before the 1976 Act, the last major revision to statutory copyright law in the United States occurred in 1909. In deliberating the Act, Congress noted that extensive technological advances had occurred since the adoption of the 1909 Act. Television, motion pictures, sound recordings, and radio were cited as examples. The Act was designed in part to address intellectual property questions raised by these new forms of communication. Barbara Ringer, who later became US Register of Copyrights in 1973, began taking an active role in advocating for and drafting a new copyright act, particularly to protect the rights of authors with the advent of new technologies.
Aside from advances in technology, the other main impetus behind the adoption of the 1976 Act was the development of and the United States' participation in the Universal Copyright Convention . While the U.S. became a party to the UCC in 1955, Congress passed Public Law 743 in order to modify copyright law to conform to the Convention's standards.
In the years following the United States' adoption of the UCC, Congress commissioned multiple studies on a general revision of copyright law, culminating in a published report in 1961. A draft of the bill was introduced in both the House and Senate in 1964, but the original version of the Act was revised multiple times between 1964 and 1976. The bill was passed as S. 22 of the 94th Congress by a vote of 97–0 in the Senate on February 19, 1976. S. 22 was passed by a vote of 316–7 in the House of Representatives on September 22, 1976. The final version was adopted as title 17 of the United States Code on October 19, 1976, when President Gerald Ford signed it into law. The law went into effect on January 1, 1978. At the time, the law was considered to be a fair compromise between publishers' and authors' rights.
Ringer called the new law "a balanced compromise that comes down on the authors' and creators' side in almost every instance." The law was almost exclusively discussed in publishers' and librarians' journals, with little discussion in the mainstream press. The claimed advantage of the law's extension of the term of subsisting copyrights was that "royalties will be paid to widows and heirs for an extra 19 years for such about-to-expire copyrights as those on Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio". The other intent of the extension was to protect authors' rights "for life plus 50 years—the most common term internationally and the one [Mark] Twain fought for in his lifetime". Further extensions of both term and scope had been desired by some, as outlined in a Time article.

Significant portions of the Act

The 1976 Act, through its terms, displaces all previous copyright laws in the United States insofar as those laws conflict with the Act. Those include prior federal legislation, such as the Copyright Act of 1909, and extend to all relevant common law and state copyright laws.

Subject matter of copyright

Under section 102 of the Act, copyright protection extends to "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device". The Act defines "works of authorship" as any of the following:
  1. literary works,
  2. musical works, including any accompanying words,
  3. dramatic works, including any accompanying music,
  4. pantomimes and choreographic works,
  5. pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works,
  6. motion pictures and other audiovisual works, and
  7. sound recordings.
An eighth category, architectural works, was added in 1990.
The wording of section 102 is significant mainly because it effectuated a major change in the mode of United States copyright protection. Under the last major statutory revision to U.S. copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1909, federal statutory copyright protection attached to original works only when those works were 1) published and 2) had a notice of copyright affixed. State copyright law governed protection for unpublished works before the adoption of the 1976 Act, but published works, whether containing a notice of copyright or not, were governed exclusively by federal law. If no notice of copyright was affixed to a work and the work was, in fact, "published" in a legal sense, the 1909 Act provided no copyright protection and the work became part of the public domain. Under the 1976 Act, however, section 102 says that copyright protection extends to original works that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Thus, the 1976 Act broadened the scope of federal statutory copyright protection from "published" works to works that are "fixed".
Section 102 excludes several categories from copyright protection, partly codifying the concept of idea–expression distinction from Baker v. Selden. It requires that "in no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."

Sound recordings and musical compositions

There are separate copyright protections for musical compositions and sound recordings. Composition copyright includes lyrics and unless self-published, is usually transferred under the terms of a publishing contract. Many record companies will also require that sound recording copyright be transferred to them as part of the terms of an album release; however, the owner of the composition copyright is not always the same as the owner of the sound recording copyright.

Exclusive rights

Section 106 granted five exclusive rights to copyright holders, all of which are subject to the remaining sections in chapter 1 :
  1. the right to reproduce the work into copies and phonorecords,
  2. the right to create derivative works of the original work,
  3. the right to distribute copies and phonorecords of the work to the public by sale, lease, or rental,
  4. the right to perform the work publicly, and
  5. the right to display the work publicly.

    Reproduction, adaptation, and distribution

The first three enumerated rights apply to all kinds of copyrighted works and have been "characterized as rights of copying, recording, adaptation, and publishing." The reproduction right encompasses the right to create a new fixation of a work, i.e. any material object in which its embodiment is "sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration." Visually perceptible "copies" and "phonorecords" both fall under the reproduction right, and the right is implicated when a work is copied "in whole or in any substantial part," and when a work is imitated rather than duplicated exactly.
The term derivative work was coined in the early 1960s, during the early stages of the copyright law revision process, to unify the provisions of the 1909 Act specifying the types of adaptations of an existing work that should be eligible for their own copyright protection and the types of adaptations that should require permission from the copyright owner of the existing work. A 1963 draft bill defined the term "derivative work" within the subject-matter provision clarifying that such adaptations were eligible for copyright as long as they were original. However, it subsumed the adaptation right under the reproduction right, conceived of as a broad right to make copies or recordings of a work, including "translations, adaptations and other derivative works." However, a subsequent draft in 1964 reintroduced the derivative work right as a separate right to make clear that adaptation, and not just verbatim copying, is within the scope of the author's exclusive rights. The same definition of "derivative work" was used to specify both the scope of the derivative work right and what types of transformations of existing works were eligible for independent copyright protection.
File:Von's Book Shop Basement.jpg|thumb|The first-sale doctrine allows persons other than the copyright owner, such as this used bookstore, to resell copies of works.
The relationship between the reproduction right and the derivative work right has been the subject of debate. The House Report accompanying the 1976 Act clarifies that "wide departures or variations from the copyrighted work would still be an infringement" of the reproduction right provided that a portion of the copyrightable expression in the work is reproduced and not just the ideas. However, Rebecca Tushnet has argued that non-literal copying should implicate the derivative work right, whereas the reproduction right should be limited to "exact or near-exact copying."
The distribution right encompasses the author's right to control the first publication of a work. The first-sale doctrine limits the scope of this right: once the copyright owner has parted with ownership of a particular copy or phonorecord of a work, the present owner of that item is free to sell, give away, or otherwise dispose of it. However, distribution of infringing copies or phonorecords would be an infringement of the distribution right. Reselling stolen copies of the work would likewise be an infringement. More generally, merely possessing a copy of a work acquired through rental, lease, or lending does not give the person in possession of it the right to distribute or dispose of it.