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U.S. House Subcommittee Passes Bill to Provide Royalty Payments to Artists from Radio Broadcasters
Performance Rights Act of 2007
H.R.4789, 06/25/2008
Basic Information
The U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property (“House Subcommittee”) approved a bill seeking to provide fair compensation to artists for use of their sound recordings. The bill, known as “The Performance Rights Act of 2007,” will remove a decades-old exemption in federal copyright law that excuses local radio stations from paying royalties to performers. The proposed legislation makes clear that nothing in the “Performance Rights Act” will adversely affect the current public performance rights or royalties payable to songwriters or copyright owners of musical works.
The proposed legislation amends federal copyright law to grant performers of sound recordings a right to compensation from terrestrial broadcasters. It also establishes a flat annual fee in lieu of royalty payments for individual terrestrial broadcast stations with gross annual revenues of less than $1.25 million, and for non-commercial, public broadcast stations. Further, terrestrial broadcast stations could option to pay a per-program license if they only intend to make limited feature uses of sound recordings.
The proposed legislation carves out an exemption from the new requirement of royalty payments for broadcasters of religious services and for broadcasters making only incidental uses of musical sound recordings.
The House Subcommittee referred the bill to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary (“Senate Committee”) on December 18, 2008. The Senate Committee continues with deliberations on the bill’s provisions.
Rep. Howard L. Berman (CA-28) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT) introduced the bill on their respective congressional floors on December 18, 2007.
View a PDF of the proposed legislation.Service
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