We understand that a Bill may be presented to the House which would, 50 years after a work is published, require the payment of a minimal maintenance fee if the copyright holder wishes to keep up the copyright. Works for which this fee is repeatedly not paid would enter the public domain. We understand the legislation would also require those who paid the fee to list the name and address of a copyright agent, who could handle any permission or licensing requests.

We write to you to support this effort, and others like it, in the strongest terms — in particular because of the beneficial effect it would have on preservation and restoration of motion pictures. In fact, to put it more strongly, without this proposal or one like it, we face a real danger of the continuing destruction of the majority of the nation's film heritage and the public unavailability of much of the rest. Tragically, the legal restrictions that archivists now labor under impose extraordinary burdens on restoration, digitization and access to "orphan films" — those which are no longer under "active copyright management," no longer commercially exploited, and which frequently have no identifiable copyright holder. The orphan films are unimaginably diverse: they include documentaries, newsreels, independent productions, rare historic footage documenting daily life for ethnic minorities, and commercial works whose owners have abandoned or forgotten them. As the Library of Congress's study of film preservation (and every other significant study before and since) has found, these films make up the majority of our film heritage and they are the ones most urgently in need of preservation and restoration from the inexorable processes of chemical decay. In all probability, no copyright holder would appear to object if these films were to be restored, digitized, even placed on the Internet — available to every school kid, film scholar, every citizen. But copyright is a "strict liability system" and the nation's archives, or the volunteer entrepreneurs of the Internet community, cannot take that chance. Even those films that have been restored at public expense cannot be shown to the very public that has paid for their restoration. As the Library of Congress's study said ruefully in 1993, because of the legal restrictions on making films available, "[f]or many of those seeking copies of films, archivists can look as if they are perversely saving films for a posterity that never quite arrives." Since that Report was issued, Congress has extended the copyright term again, for another twenty years, and the problems are — if anything — more severe.

The copyright system is a fabulous method for encouraging innovation and creativity. But its lengthy period of protection comes with a price. The vast majority of works — which only have a commercial life of a few years — are legally locked up for a century, together with the one or two percent of works that have more lasting commercial value. This system has a particularly tragic effect upon film, which in many respects was the medium of the 20th century. The film formats of the last century are all prone to various kinds of decay. They cannot simply be left in the back of a vault until the copyright term expires. Of the tens or hundreds of thousands of movies made before 1950, fully 50% are irretrievably lost. For films made before 1929, the loss rate is far worse: 80% of films of the 1920's, and 90% of films from the 1910's are gone. The nation's great public and private archives currently labor under an unnecessary legal threat as they seek to preserve the films that remain. The same is true of the academic, volunteer, and Internet film archive communities and of the stock—film and documentary film industries. By allowing the true orphan films to enter the public domain, and facilitating the process of contacting the copyright agents for those films which are still being actively managed, this Bill would immeasurably aid restoration and preservation, while maintaining — and even promoting — the commercial interests of continuing copyright management. It would be a tragedy if we let the film history of the 20th century crumble into dust or linger in the nation's archives, inaccessible to all but a few scholars. This proposal would not by itself solve the problem of film preservation, but it would provide vital assistance and we strongly support it.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can provide further assistance. Yours sincerely,