Copyright Royalty Judges Program Technical Corrections Act

COPYRIGHT ROYALTY JUDGES PROGRAM TECHNICAL CORRECTIONS ACT -- (House of Representatives - September 25, 2006)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SMITH of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, as Chairman Sensenbrenner just stated, H.R. 1036, the Copyright Royalty Judges Program Technical Corrections Act, amends certain technical aspects of the Copyright Act which itself was amended by the Copyright Royalty and Distribution Reform Act of 2004.

A chief objective of the Copyright Reform Act was to delineate between functions of the Copyright Office and the functions of the newly established Copyright Royalty Judges, or CRJs.

Unfortunately, during the bill enrollment process, the law was written to state that the Librarian of Congress was charged with authorizing the distribution of funds. The language could be subject to an interpretation that Congress wanted the Librarian to retain a role that had clearly been intended to be exercised only by the new CRJs.

The purpose behind this bill is to correct errors such as this and to enable the reform act to operate as Congress originally intended.

In addition, the bill contains a number of other noncontroversial stylistic, technical, clarifying, and conforming changes that have been considered and agreed to by Members on both sides of the aisle.

As Chairman Sensenbrenner noted, H.R. 1036 has already passed the House of Representatives without objection on November 16, 2005.

The reason the bill has returned is because the other body amended it to include language from H.R. 5593, the Royalty Distribution Clarification Act of 2006, which was a bill I authored and introduced along with Ranking Members CONYERS and BERMAN. The purpose of that bill and the incorporated language is to provide the CRJs with explicit statutory language to distribute, prior to the end of a royalty distribution proceeding, part of the royalty pool when it is established who the rightful claimants are.

Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to support the amended Copyright Royalty Judges Program Technical Corrections Act and send the bill directly to the President for his signature.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

http://thomas.loc.gov/