Ted Deutch: “I thank the ranking member and the chairman for their leadership. I thank Congressman Jeffries and Congressman Collins…”

“I thank the ranking member and the chairman for their leadership. I thank Congressman Jeffries and Congressman Collins for helping to shepherd the bill to this point. It is a pleasure to vote on these much-needed consensus reforms. Consensus on copyright has been difficult. It has been difficult to forge between the various interests represented in the content and the tech communities but, fortunately, we now have consensus. Much of that has been borne out of true necessity, the technological demands of licensing tens of millions of songs and streaming services, and much of it has been borne out of basic fairness. Recording artists, songwriters, producers, and engineers deserve to be paid for their creativity and genius; and digital services deserve more certainty in their operations. The current system is broken. As someone who cares deeply about music and the incredible people who are a part of making it and who understands the importance of the intersection of technology and creative works that benefit all American music fans, I really feel privileged to be part of this process of modernizing our copyright laws. The Music Modernization Act does not include everything that I have supported to bring fairness and 21st- century sophistication to the copyright laws, but it takes big steps forward toward those goals.…”