From: "Alex F" <alexf@iss.net> Organization: Internet Security Systems, Inc. Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 14:19:08 +0000 Precedence: bulk
- The entertainment industry has a reputation of being paranoid
The forgers of the copyright laws (at least as they relate to music) had incredible foresight. Basically, from the laws that were originally drafted (30's maybe? Then revised in the early '70's at least as far as public domain goes) both videos and CDs are protected. These were written when there were no CDs or videos. Uh, this isn't true. The Copyright Act of 1909, the immediate predecessor to the Copyright Act of 1976/1978 (*), did not explicitly cover sound recordings. *Sheet music* was protected by copyright, but it was an open question whether sound recordings were protected. In fact, the recording industry was sufficiently unsure of the outcome of a copyright challenge that they never let the issue go to court. It wasn't until the '76 Act that sound recordings were explicitly added to the set of copyrightable works of authorship. As for video and other digital media, it also wasn't until the '76 Act that the "perceivable to the naked eye" test was modified to allow aid via machine. The '76 Act was a complete rewrite of copyright law; it did a lot more than change things with respect to "public domain," although writing into law the "fair use" test developed by the courts since the '09 Act was certainly part of it. --bal (*) It's call the Copyright Act of "1976" because (IIRC) it passed Congress in '76. But it didn't go into effect until Jan. 1, 1978. Copyright law did not change between the '09 and '76 Acts. (Work on the '76 Act actually began in the 50s; it took Congress over 20 years to figure out what it wanted to do. Contrast that with today, where we've had more changes in copyright law since 1976 than in the prior 200 years.)