Good morning, Ms. Peters and members of the committee. My name is Polly Law. I'm an illustrator and the President of the Graphic Artists Guild. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to express our views on the proposed raise in copyright registration fees. The Graphic Artists Guild is a national union of 2800 members. Our members include editorial illustrators, children's book illustrators, fashion illustrators, medical and scientific illustrators, cartoonists, animators, greeting card designers, logo and typeface designers, textile designers, and computer and video artists. It is their creative output, for example, that transforms an ordinary t-shirt into an ad for a company, a merchandising tool, or a collector's item. The Guild's mission is to promote and protect the economic interests of its members, to improve conditions for all creators of graphic art and to raise standards for the entire industry.

• Raising fees would discourage artists from registering their work.
  As it is, our survey data indicate that only 13% of illustrators and 14% of graphic designers currently register their works. Among the reasons they cite are the high costs and the administrative burdens of the registration process. As one of our members wrote, "For me, it already costs too much money. Each month I create an average of a dozen spot illustrations. For more than half of them, I am paid less than $50 per image, and for the other half, I receive nothing until one sells. My return per piece doesn't justify even the $20 registration fee for these pieces, so I rely on the laws and my agreements with clients to protect my rights." If more than 80 percent of graphic artists already forego registration due to its high costs in time and money, it stands to reason that if fees are raised, even fewer artist will register their works. We believe the Copyright Office should be working toward encouraging voluntary registration, rather than erecting barriers to it.
• Raising registration fees will inevitably make a vast body of work vulnerable to misuse and infringement.
  As the law stands, artists are ineligible for attorneys fees or statutory damages if their unpublished work is infringed before it was registered. Any rise in registration fees for individual graphic artists will be an open invitation to infringers, who know that an artist's remedies for an unregistered work are limited. For example, one of our members recently discovered that her personal logo, which appears on her stationery, was being sold world-wide and was appearing on t-shirts in Spain. She says, "Unfortunately, I never got around to copyrighting the image. I've talked to three different lawyers who've all told me the same thing: there's nothing I can do because I don't have a trademark or copyright on the image."
• Raising fees is contrary to the Copyright Act,
  which states that "Fees established under this subsection shall be fair and equitable." The proposed fee hike to $35 for individual authors, an increase to 175% of the current fees, is both unfair and inequitable. It is inequitable because the disproportionate impact that this would have on individual authors would amount to a regressive tax forced upon a minority population. Conversely, the fees paid by corporate entities, who stand to benefit handsomely from copyright protections, would be disproportionately low.
• Furthermore, the proposed fee hike is unfair.
  As copyright registration fees and the cost of living have gone up, artists' fees have gone down. For example, in 1936, a commission to execute a cover for a consumer magazine paid about $2,500.00. If artist fees had at least kept pace with inflation, that same commission today should be $27,000. Instead, that same commission today pays about $2,500.00, a loss of more than 93% in real dollars. Looking at this another way, in 1936 I would have paid about 1/10 of 1 percent of my commission to register copyright for a work. Under the proposed fee schedule, I would have to pay nearly 1.4% of the same $2,500 commission, a fifteenfold increase in my expenses. And incidentally, in 1936, $2,500 would have bought me a house and an acre of land in Stockbridge, Mass., like Norman Rockwell's. Today, it would not even pay the property tax on that house! In contrast, advertising revenues for magazines have risen 6,000% since 1936, from $150 million to over $9 billion last year. An increase in fees uniformly applied to magazine publishers and to the artists who provide their content is hardly fair or equitable.

• First, maintain the existing fee structure for the registration of works by individual authors.
  Since the greatest barrier preventing artists from registering their works is the high cost of registration, maintaining the current fee level at $20, would at least not further reduce the number of artists who register their work.
• Second, raise registration fees for "works made for hire."
  It is unfair and inequitable to expect an individual artist to pay the same dollar amount to protect art created for a greeting card, worth about $350, as a major film studio that produces a motion picture. Using work-for-hire contracts, that studio assumes legal authorship over the works of numerous individual creators, and protects a property that generates millions of dollars a day --all for a single $50 fee. That is simply unfair.
  In today's increasingly cutthroat business climate, more and more of our clients are demanding more and more rights through work-for-hire and all-rights contracts. The Graphic Artists Guild has been unalterably opposed to work for hire contracts for decades, because they deprive individual creators of authorship. Adoption of a two-tiered policy would help discourage unnecessary work-for-hire agreements, and encourage clients to license only the rights and uses they actually need, supporting the pay-per-use system that copyright law intended.
  A two-tiered fee system has precedent. The Patent and Trademark Office has a set of regular fees and a corresponding set of fees for small entities. The small entity fees, which amount to half the amount of the regular fees, apply to independent inventors, small business concerns, and nonprofit organizations. Therefore, distinguishing between individuals and corporate entities is both reasonable and do-able.
• Third, maintain current fees for group registrations, and expand group registration to include published works.
  In the written testimony we've provided, artists repeatedly insisted that they would register more works more often if it were easier to register groups of works. The current options available for group registration are too narrow for most artists. One of our members explained, "By rough estimate, I guess there might be some 40 plus images which I could, so far, register this year. Some might be grouped, but most would need to be registered individually, so the cost would be around $800. In addition, I've just made available over 200 [published] images -- representing near 25 years of my work --for stock sale. Registering these would cost over $4,000."

In closing, the Graphic Artists Guild strongly opposes raising registration fees for individual artists and designers. This financial burden will create a copyright system that benefits only authors-in-law, while authors-in-fact are discouraged from creating new works. Artists have a tough enough time protecting their rights in the business world. We do not need burdens added by the federal government. Already the perception exists that the government is not on the side of creators. The U.S. Postal Service, for example, imposes work-for-hire contracts on individual artists who create stamp designs, but does not impose these terms on Warner Brothers when they create a Tweety Bird stamp. That unfortunate perception is reinforced when the Copyright Office proposes that Warner Brothers should get away with paying the same copyright registration fee that an individual artist would pay.

We strongly urge the Copyright Office to execute its statutory mandate by encouraging and supporting individual authors in the creation of new works, and by facilitating the voluntary registration of those works. Only if these policies are adopted and implemented will the public interest be truly served. Finally, if it is determined that individual registration fees must be raised, we urge the Copyright Office to allow a grace period which would enable the Graphic Artists Guild and other concerned organizations to conduct a copyright registration drive to encourage creators to protect their works while current rates remain in effect.

Thank-you again for the opportunity to present our position on this important issue.

Dear Marybeth:

Once again, the Graphic Artists Guild would like to thank the Copyright Office for the opportunity to express our views on this issue, and to commend the Copyright Office for the fairness and openness that have characterized this process so far. While we reiterate the points we made in our previous statements, we appreciated the thoughtfulness of the participants in the October 1 hearing, and would like to comment on some of the ideas and suggestions that were proposed.

We strongly support the recommendation made by the Picture Agencies Council of America (PACA), that Copyright Office regulations be amended to make a publisher's registration of a collective work or compilation sufficient to give individual contributors the same protection as if they had registered their contributions individually. This can easily be administered by the Copyright Office as every collection or compilation deposited contains the names of each individual contributor attached to his or her contribution. It would also reduce the burden on the Copyright Office of processing redundant registration applications and deposit copies of published works.

However, in the absence of the change advocated above, and if the proposed raise in registration fees is deemed necessary, we support the proposal by Professional Photographers of America (PPA) that fee distinctions be based on the economic value of a registered work. Such a "value-based" system could be easily administered simply by requiring the registrant to provide a good faith estimate of projected revenues from the work. It would not be the responsibility of the Copyright Office to determine the accuracy of an estimate. Instead, the courts could be empowered to invalidate any registration found to contain fraudulent information.

The fact is that the incentives built into ( 412 of the Copyright Act have not worked. As the Guild has extensively documented, the lamentable reality is that artists do not register their work in a timely manner, making it especially vulnerable to infringement. To address the problem of creators' chronic ineligibility for attorneys' fees and statutory damages if their unpublished works are not timely registered, we propose the following: Amend ( 412 to allow any rightsholder who registers a work after an infringement has occurred, to be eligible for attorneys' fees and statutory damages, provided they pay a significantly higher registration fee. This fee could be as much as $300-$500. This measure would accomplish three goals:

• It would provide a more effective incentive for creators to register more works in a timely manner at the lower rate, which should remain at $20.
• It would permit creators and any other rightsholders to benefit from the full protection the law provides.
• It would generate increased revenues for the Copyright Office to offset its administrative expenses.

The Graphic Artists Guild reaffirms its willingness to work with your and your staff to advance the goals of the Copyright Act and to protect the rights of creators.

Sincerely,

Paul Basista,
CAE Executive Director