Orrin Hatch: “with the imminent passage of the work made for hire legislation today, I believe a few comments are in order. Last year…”

“with the imminent passage of the work made for hire legislation today, I believe a few comments are in order. Last year a technical amendment was included in the Intellectual Property and Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999 which added sound recordings to the list of works eligible for, or considered as having, the status of works made for hire under the Copyright Act. Works made within the scope of employment or large collaborative works such as motion pictures are most often accorded the status of works made for hire, and the copyright for those works resides in the employer or the corporation doing the hiring, such as the movie studio. The status of sound recordings had been in some doubt because sound recordings did not obtain the status of copyrighted works until relatively recently, and, when added to the list of copyrightable works was not added to the list of works made for hire. When the technical amendment was raised for consideration in the conference, our research indicated that the practice of the Copyright Office has uniformly been to register sound recordings as works made for hire. The technical amendment therefore seemed a reasonable codification of the ongoing practice at the Copyright Office, and was adopted. Soon thereafter, however, it became clear that while the technical amendment aligned the code with long-time Copyright Office practice, it was not uncontroversial.”