New Copyright Office Regs Concerning Pre-72 Recordings

Here Chris Castle outlines some of the new regulations surrounding how the passage of the CLASSICS Act section of the MMA will effect pre-72 recording copyright owners, and the procedure for recovering statutory damages for infringement.

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Guest post by Chris Castle of Music Tech Solutions

Title II of the Music Modernization Act (“MMA”), (also known by its own bill title the Classics Protection and Access Act or the “CLASSICS Act) is self-executing legislation that gives certain federal copyright protections to recordings released prior to February 15, 1972.  One of the new protections is the right to recover the customary statutory damages for infringements of those pre-72 recordings available to copyright owners in the normal course.

However, in order to be eligible to recover statutory damages, copyright owners of pre-72 recordings must file Excel spreadsheets of schedules listing their pre-1972 recordings and contact information with the U.S. Copyright Office to be indexed by the Copyright Office into the Office’s public records.  This formality is in lieu of filing the customary copyright registrations.  Statutory damages are only available for infringements occurring more than 90 days after indexing.   The index is available at https://www.copyright.gov/music-modernization/pre1972-soundrecordings/search-soundrecordings.html.

In addition to imposing this formality on copyright owners, the MMA creates a new safe harbor for infringers. That safe harbor was just coincidentally added at the insistence of Senator Ron Wyden under threat of a Senate hold on the entire bill. If the infringer is making a noncommercial use of a sound recording that is not being commercially exploited, statutory damages are not available provided that the infringer has made a ‘‘good faith, reasonable search for’’ the infringed work in the indexed schedules before determining that the recording is not being commercially exploited.

The MMA creates an additional and separate safe harbor for entities that were transmitting pre-72 recordings at the time the MMA was enacted.  Rights owners must provide specific notice to such entities before pursuing remedies against them.  In order to provide such notice, that transmitting entity must register their contact information with the Copyright Office within 180 days from enactment (which expired April 9, 2019) (available at https://www.copyright.gov/music-modernization/pre1972-soundrecordings/notices-contact-information.html).

For those reading along at home, the Final Rule is found in 37 C.F.R. §201.35 (available at https://www.copyright.gov/title37/201/37cfr201-35.html) and was published at 84 Fed. Reg. 10679 (March 22, 2019) https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-03-22/pdf/2019-05549.pdf.