Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The copyright bill before us today is an important housekeeping measure that contains largely technical and clarifying amendments to title 17 of the United States Code. For the few changes that are more substantive in nature, they are noncontroversial and are recognized as improvements to a code that is all too often perceived as complex. S. 3689, the Copyright Cleanup, Clarification, and Corrections Act of 2010, was originally introduced and passed by the other body on the 2nd day of August. Since that time, the House Committee on the Judiciary has worked in a bipartisan manner to consider the measure and to incorporate modest improvements to the bill. While I expect the majority to detail most of the bill's provisions, I do want to note some significant provisions, including an important change from the measure that passed the other body in August. That change is in the deletion of language contained in section 4(a) that would amend the Copyright Act to permit the owner of an exclusive right to sublicense that right or further transfer it if the original copyright owner had not expressly prohibited these actions in a prior written agreement. This provision raised a number of concerns among copyright owners who feared that those who had relied on a prior judicial decision in the case of Gardner v. Nike might be disadvantaged by such a change.…”