College & Research Libraries News vol. 79, no. 4 (April 2018)


April 2018 205 C&RL News

Shawnda Hines is assistant director of communications, 
email: shines@ala.org, and Carrie Russell is director of 
the Program on Public Access to Information, email 
crussell@alawash.org, in ALA’s Washington Office

W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n eShawnda Hines and Carrie Russell

Federal library funding 
The campaign to protect federal funding 
for libraries in fiscal year (FY) 2019 kicked 
off in mid-February with the release of the 
White House budget, which again pro-
posed eliminating the Institute for Museum 
and Library Services. Meanwhile (as of this 
writing), Congress still has not completed 
its FY 2018 budget. ALA members continue 
to advocate for increased funding for li-
brary programs.

In early March, ALA launched a campaign 
to gather congressional signatories on letters 
urging support in FY 2019 for the Library 
Services and Technology Act and Innovative 
Approaches to Literacy programs, which 
together currently comprise more than 
$210 million in federal funding for libraries. 
Authored by a bipartisan group of library 
champions in the House of Representatives, 
the letters were slated to be delivered to 
members of the House Appropriations Com-
mittee at the end of March. 

Efforts to gather signatures for companion 
letters to Senate appropriators will continue 
through April. Visit www.ala.org/fundlibraries to 
track whether your representative and sena-
tors have signed the FY 2019 letters and see 
their history of support for previous years’ 
“Dear Appropriator” letters. 

Music copyright legislation 
proceeding
The House Judiciary Committee will soon 
drop three bills on music copyright. This is 
remarkable because all of the players—the 
labels, the radio stations, the songwriters, 

and streaming services—have actually agreed 
to a new copyright amendment. Does the 
legislation affect libraries? Potentially. 

The CLASSICS (Compensating Legacy Art-
ists for their Songs, Service, and Important 
Contributions to Society) ACT would provide 
federal copyright to pre-1972 sound record-
ings, but only for a digital performance right. 
All other copyright-related rights for pre-1972 
sound recordings remain under state jurisdic-
tion. This legislation primarily settles the mat-
ter that streaming services like Spotify have 
to pay royalties to rights holders and artists. 

For libraries, there’s good and bad news. 
The good news is that the bill includes Sec-
tion 107 and 108 (fair use and the library 
reproduction right). Section 107 would pro-
vide justification for streaming songs without 
prior authorization or fee when the use is 
fair. The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) has 
asked that Section 110 (1) and 110 (2), the 
public performance exceptions, be included 
in the bill. 

The bad news is that the copyright term 
for pre-1972 sound recordings adds 95 years 
of protection to pre-1972 sound recordings 
when the legislation goes into effect. Pre-1972 
sound recordings would have a longer copy-
right term than post-1972 sound recordings.
This would allow the record labels and artists 
a longer time to collect royalties from older 
songs that are popular on streaming services. 
LCA provided amendment language to both 
the House and Senate Judiciary Committee to 
start the copyright term clock at the point of 
publication, like most protected works with 
a corporate copyright term. 

This is fast-moving legislation with little 
opposition that may make it through Con-
gress before this article is published. Follow 
ALA’s District Dispatch blog for updates at 
www.districtdispatch.org. 

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