Public Law number 94-553 no relation amendment
The Copyright Act of 1976 is a United States copyright law and remains the primary basis of copyright law in the United States, as amended by several later enacted copyright provisions. The Act spells out the basic rights of copyright holders, codified the doctrine of "fair use", and for most new copyrights adopted a unitary term based on the date of the author's death rather than the prior scheme of fixed initial and renewal terms. It became Public Law number 94-553 on October 19, 1976 and went into effect on January 1, 1978.History and purpose
Before the 1976 Act, the last major revision to statutory copyright law in the United States occurred in 1909. In deliberating the Act, Congress noted that extensive technological advances had occurred since the adoption of the 1909 Act. Television, motion pictures, sound recordings, and radio were cited as examples. The Act was designed in part to address intellectual property questions raised by these new forms of communication.Aside from advances in technology, the other main impetus behind the adoption of the 1976 Act was the development of and the United States' participation in the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) (and its anticipated participation in the Berne Convention). While the U.S. became a party to the UCC in 1955, the machinery of government was slow to update U.S. copyright law to conform to the Convention's standards. Barbara Ringer, the US Register of Copyrights, took an active role in drafting a new copyright act.In the years following the United States' adoption of the UCC, Congress commissioned multiple studies on a general revision of copyright law, culminating in a  published report in 1961. A draft of the bill was introduced in both the House and Senate in 1964, but the original version of the Act was revised multiple times between 1964 and 1976 (see House report number 94-1476). The bill was passed as S. 22 of the 94th Congress by a vote of 97–0 in the Senate on February 19, 1976. S. 22 was passed by a vote of 316–7 in the House of Representatives on September 22, 1976. The final version was adopted into law as title 17 of the United States Code on October 19, 1976 when Gerald Ford signed it. The law went into effect on January 1, 1978. At the time, the law was considered to be a fair compromise between publishers' and authors' rights.Barbara Ringer called the new law "a balanced compromise that comes down on the authors' and creators' side in almost every instance." The law was almost exclusively discussed in publishers' and librarians' journals, with little discussion in the mainstream press. The claimed advantage of the law's extension of the term of subsisting copyrights was that "royalties will be paid to widows and heirs for an extra 19 years for such about-to-expire copyrights as those on Sherword Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio". The other intent of the extension was to protect authors' rights "for life plus 50 years—the most common term internationally and the one Twain fought for in his lifetime". Further extensions of both term and scope had been desired by some, as outlined in a Time article.literary works,
musical works, including any accompanying words,
dramatic works, including any accompanying music,
pantomimes and choreographic works,
pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works,
motion pictures and other audiovisual works, and
sound recordings.An eighth category, architectural works, was added in 1990.
The wording of section 102 is significant mainly because it effectuated a major change in the mode of United States copyright protection. Under the last major statutory revision to U.S. copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1909, federal statutory copyright protection attached to original works only when those works were 1) published and 2) had a notice of copyright affixed. State copyright law governed protection for unpublished works before the adoption of the 1976 Act, but published works, whether containing a notice of copyright or not, were governed exclusively by federal law. If no notice of copyright was affixed to a work and the work was, in fact, "published" in a legal sense, the 1909 Act provided no copyright protection and the work became part of the public domain. Under the 1976 Act, however, section 102 says that copyright protection extends to original works that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Thus, the 1976 Act broadened the scope of federal statutory copyright protection from "published" works to works that are "fixed".Section 102(b) excludes several categories from copyright protection, partly codifying the concept of idea–expression distinction from Baker v. Selden. It requires that "in no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."the purpose and character of the use (commercial or educational, trans-formative or reproductive, political);
the nature of the copyrighted work (fictional or factual, the degree of creativity);
the amount and substantiality of the portion of the original work used; and
the effect of the use upon the market (or potential market) for the original work.The Act was later amended to extend the fair use defense to unpublished works.Term of protection
Previous copyright law set the duration of copyright protection at 28 years with a possibility of a 28 year extension, for a total maximum term of 56 years. The 1976 Act, however, substantially increased the term of protection. Section 302 of the Act extended protection to "a term consisting of the life of the author and fifty years after the author's death". In addition, the Act created a static 75-year term (dated from the date of publication) for anonymous works, pseudonymous works, and works made for hire. The extension term for works copyrighted before 1978 that had not already entered the public domain was increased from 28 years to 47 years, giving a total term of 75 years. In 1998 the Copyright Term Extension Act further extended copyright protection to the duration of the author's life plus 70 years for general copyrights and to 95 years from date of publication or 120 years from date of creation, whichever comes first, for works made for hire. Works copyrighted before 1978 have a duration of protection that depends on a variety of factors.Transfer of copyright
Section 204 of the Act governs the transfer of ownership of copyrights. The section requires a copyright holder to sign a written instrument of conveyance that expressly transfers ownership of the copyright to the intended recipient for a transfer to be effective. Prior case law on this issue was conflicting, with some cases espousing a rule similar to section 204 and others reaching a quite different conclusion.  In the 1942 New York case Pushman v. New York Graphic Society, for example, the court held that although a copyright in a work is distinct from a property right in a copy of the work, where the only existing copy of the work is transferred, the copyright is transferred along with the copy, unless expressly withheld by the author. Section 202 of the 1976 Act retains the property right/copyright distinction, but section 204 eliminates the inconsistent common law by assuming that the copyright is withheld by the author unless it is expressly transferred.
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