a policy brief that was issued and then was drafted by the Republican Study Committee. And it was asking some pretty fundamental questions about the basis of our copyright laws and a lot of assumptions that we take for granted in the debates around copyright law. And we at Public Knowledge have been interested in copyright reform for quite some time. Some of the more specific ideas you can find on the internet at internetblueprint.org. But the occasion of this memo, I think, it raised the need for a broader conversation on copyright, addressing some more fundamental issues. A conversation that's not gonna left nor right, and it's one that takes a step back and reassesses how the system of laws that's almost as old as the country itself has changed dramatically in just a few decades after the bicentennial. So we need to assess how our copyright laws and whether they fulfill their constitutional purpose to promote the progress of science and musical arts. And also to see how they fit in with and how they reconcile themselves with more fundamental and older principles of law, such as people's rights in real property, in personal property, and in the right to free expression. So to discuss these issues today, we have Jerry Breedon, who's a senior research fellow at the Mercado Center, and an active professor of law at George Winston University. Also Mario Kaminski. Matt Shears, who's vice president of law and policy at the Community or Communications Industry Association. And I'll be joining him as well. My name's Sherwin C., I'm vice president of Legal Affairs and Public Knowledge. So as for the format, will each of us spend about five minutes discussing some of the background issues involved with copyright law and some of the tensions that have arisen between it and its original purpose. And then have a short discussion amongst ourselves about potential solutions and potential ways forward out of these tensions. Then we'll open it up for some questions. So, is that up for the original? Jerry. Thank you, Sherwin. Sherwin said my name's Jerry Breedon, and I'm the editor of a new book called The Copyright Compounds that was sensitive to excess. And it is a pre-market case for copyright reform. It includes essays by conservative and libertarian thinkers such as Rick Lanzalong, Patrick Groening, David Post, Tom Bell, Christina Mulligan, Guy Arado, and others. Now, maybe I won't get too deep into economics. But the thing about it is that copyright's property is more akin to something like tradable commercial conditions. It's this is called a market failure. So if you create a cap and trade system and cap emissions and you have tradable emissions permits and you hand out those permits and they're tradable in the market and they're property. Right? But they're different. They're a statutory property. You can think of also taxicabin downings as statutory created property. You have market failure congestion. You want to ration sort of traffic. So you have these medallions like New York City has that allows taxis to operate. These are very valuable. It costs a million dollars for a taxi and they're on New York City. They're definitely property that they're pretty different. And that's what copyright is more like. Now, when you have statutory created property, it's going to be subject to a three-year cocktail called a knowledge problem. And the thing about a knowledge problem is it deserves a libertarianism. We are very aware of this problem in regulation, right? But the data required for rational economic planning is distributed among individuals. It's sort of outside the possible knowledge of a central planning authority, right? You can't plan, they're also agreeing with how much we need to grow or how many squares to make.  This is sort of central to conservative with respect to thinking. And it also applies to copyright. How do we know what the right contours of copyright are? Framers, you know, the framers of the Constitution are sort of constitutionally ratified in 1789. And a lot of the same folks were working in the same Congress, in the first Congress, I should say. And in 1790, they passed the first copyright act, right? So they understood what sort of powers they were giving themselves in that first Congress. And they created a copyright act that was limited to 14 years for copyright term, pretty old for 14 more, and included formalities, meaning that you had to register as soon as you get copyright, and you had to renew the copyright for a second term if you wanted to. Today, we have a life of the author plus 70 years, which is a big expansion, and there are no formalities. So, which is right? How do we know? Is it somewhere in between where the framers belong or are we right now? It's very difficult to find out. Now, because the contours of copyright are planned by contours, there's another problem. This is a public choice problem, right? And we, as concerns and returners are very aware of this problem in other areas, right? This is a problem that's causing great benefits and defuse costs. You can think of resumon subsidies where organized special interests will log in to get a government subsidy, and who bears the cost of that? It is a defused public that who does not have, they're going to sort of be, they're going to have to organize to combat that. The same exists in copyright. You have organized special interests, such as Hollywood recording industry in New York publishers, who lobby for stronger and longer copyright at the expense of the public, who get shorter and less tax-based. That was a public end of the term. It's not clear. So, one more thing I think the returns of contours need to be aware of, I think it's going to be a math that's going to touch on, which is that copyrights are not being administered through the common law force as property traditionally is. More and more it is being administered through regulation. So, I think what the RC memo showed is that Republicans, especially of the coming generation, are beginning to understand this, all right? The battle against SOCOM, which I'm going to be sure to remember, was 11th part, 15th part of the act. Republican cosponsors of the bills were the first to drop out. And who stayed until the bitter end was subpoena, when the shift was going down, defending it. I was outframing it, a member of the Screen Act in school. So, as we say in the book, a belief that needs to reform copyright is the correct, limited government position, and it's perfectly compatible with a strong kind of dependent for property rights and free market. So, that's all I'm thinking of. So, my name is Mark Khminsky. I'm the executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. And I've been researching writing and teaching in this area for a number of years. I'm going to try to stay relatively non-technical, if possible, and touch on three points in my five commitments. The first point I want to touch on is actually a little bit different. Jerry talked about how a more liberal version of copyright or less maximal version of copyright is compatible with a Republican or conservative agenda. I'm going to talk about how a copyright is actually bipartisan or non-partisan. The second point I wanted to make has to do with the role of free trade agreements, which is an area I tend to focus on, and might be surprising to some of you that that actually has interplay with the copyright policy discussion. And the third thing I wanted to discuss briefly is what I'm calling the speech intuition, which has to do with how the American public reacts to copyright law, versus how policymakers can see the copyright law. So, at first point is that copyright is bipartisan or non-partisan as an issue. This might not be as obvious from where you all sit, although it should be, because Congress has been making copyright laws since the 1970s with support from both parties. That same kind of bipartisan agenda exists on the other side as well, where people have been opposing what Congress has been doing from both parties. And this has been reflected in my experience of different organizations I've worked at, where people have worked with academically. So instead of uniting by party line, people tend to unite over intuitions about the nature of copyright, and what copyright naturally is. Whether those intuitions are reflected in US law or not reflected in US law at all. So, I wanted to make two points about the academic understanding of US copyright law. Point one is that US copyright law is the result of constitutionally granted discretion to Congress. It's, as Jerry was saying, not a right. It's Congress's power to make laws in this area. So, academics tend to see copyright as something subject to Congress's discretion. The second point is that copyright law is a distortion, and that distortion might be created to fix market failures, but it is a distortion from what would otherwise occur if copyright law didn't exist. So, the academic puzzle tends to be why does Congress use its discretion the way it does to ramp up the distortion, and why has the treatment of the distortion been moving only in one direction over basically the last 40 years? And this looks to academics like sort of a structural puzzle. It doesn't look like a political issue. So, I just wanted to flag that there are two ways this can be handled by Congress in general. It's either an opportunity for bipartisan collaboration, which is what occurs naturally in this area, or it's an opportunity for one party to really claim these issues and own them, and represent the side that normally doesn't get a voice in Congress. So, the second area I wanted to discuss briefly is the role of free trade agreements. Congress has, as Jerry has mentioned, has a number of people discussed a number of different policy levers that it can use with respect to copyright. There's no one way that copyright law has to look. So, those policy levers include things like term likes, the amount of statutory damages that are provided for in the law, and whether or not they're formalities. So, over the last, I guess almost 100 years at this point, the US has been binding itself to various international agreements that restrict how you can play with those policy levers. And those restrictions vary from being somewhat general. So, for example, Sherman and I were talking earlier about how the Brent Convention requires the US to have copyright formalities, but it's not clear that you have to have those formalities in place for all of the 75 years of US protection. It's also a requirement in a number of free trade agreements to have statutory damages, but it's not fair how big those statutory damages need to be. So, what I wanna do is encourage you to pay attention to what's going on in the free trade agreement area if you become interested in this space, because the USTR is making an executive branch land grab in this area and trying to negotiate entirely without congressional supervision. So, I'll come back to my recommendations at the end of this to say what I think you should actually actively do. And the last part I wanted to cover is to move a little bit away from the copyright as property or copyright is not property conversation, and talk about what's at the end of the other end of the spectrum. So, if copyright is on a spectrum, one end of which looks like property, the other end of that spectrum looks a heck of a lot like speech. And courts have developed a number of reasons why copyright is not in conflict with free speech rights. I don't necessarily personally agree with all of those reasons, but the usual ones that are enumerated are the expression of dichotomy, the existence of fair use, the fact that both the First Amendment and the copyright clause or IP clause exist in constitution. These get offered up as explanations for why the copyright and free speech are irreconcilable. The problem is that to most Americans, that sounds really technical. And so, when you use tools in the area of copyright law that you don't use in libel law, or you don't use what you're doing with hate speech, you run counters to an American intuition about what free speech is and get people upset to the point where they end up protesting legislation. So the big thing I wanted to flag in that area, and I'm sure somebody in the room who talked about this a great length during Q&A, is civil asset forfeiture or the seizure of domain names, where prior to many kind of trial, ICE has been seizing domain names, claiming that they are part of assets that have been used in the commission of copyright crimes. That, to your average American, is when you look like censorship. So, yeah. So, I just want to remind you that years and with the Interim Communications Industry Association, I also teach a little bit on my idea version. And actually, let me start when I teach. And the thing that first drew me to copyright, when I think about first, is what Margo referred to as the distortion. And I just wanted to define that really clearly. Because it's kind of interesting, it's counterintuitive that copyright, in fact, all intellectual property is a rectal policy choice. And it's a counterintuitive policy choice in this sense. It was a decision that in the short run, we're going to restrict access to ideas. We're going to control ideas. We're going to regulate ideas in some sense. Because we've come to the conclusion that doing that in a short run is actually going to create more access in the long run. So, it's cool in that counterintuitive way that inoculations are cool, right? You give somebody a little bit of something bad and it actually protects them from it. And so, I always found that really interesting. And that's one of the things that drew me to IP, is that we're restricting access to create more ideas. We limit ideas in the short run. And that's fun, but it also sort of points out that you can have too much of a good thing. And actually, if the SOFA pivoted maybe we had earlier in the year shows that anything, it's that there's broad consensus that there is definitely a point where we can cross way too much of a good thing. And so, it's in that context that we should think about this privacy, I'm sorry, property regulation thing that Jerry referred to. Because copyright is a sort of statutory property right, or a fiat property you can say, it's only property so much as we treat it like property and increasingly we don't. Long ago, we used to have rules that said who owns what. There was a big book that you could go and consult somewhere. And people generally think about that. When you talk about copyright, everyone sort of assumes, well, I can go to the PTO and I can see who owns every patent, right? So surely, surely I can do that with copyright. Because I can do that with real property. Here in the district, you can go down to the department of real estate assessments or whatever and figure out who owns every square inch of the district. We know that, that information is recorded. And yet with copyright, we threw that record out the window. It happened internationally about a century ago, but the US didn't actually make the decision to throw all those records away until we formally implemented the earned convention. And that was only in the 1980s. So in that sense, it really copyright is increasingly a lot less like property. And we now do a lot of other things that make it look less like property more like regulation. So we have under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act this sort of triennial rulemaking every year that every, sorry, three years, the Copyright Office puts out a notice and people who want to use copyrighted content that is secured by digital locks for certain purposes that the digital locks don't permit have to go to the Copyright Office and ask for permission to circumvent these locks. And so you have groups like Advocates for the Blind coming to the Copyright Office and saying, please, can blind people circumvent the locks on their e-books so they can read the e-books that they bought? And they have to ask every three years. You have media educators going and asking for the permission to break the digital locks on DVDs so they can form, say, movie clips. And this is particularly relevant in, say, film studies where you might want to compare Tarantino's direction to his predecessors or Hitchcock to someone else, right? You sort of need to make compilations of clips and the DVD encryption doesn't allow that so you have to break the lock, except, hey, that's illegal. And not like that, just downloading the software and distributing the software that allows media educators to do this. Well, that's a violation law too. So if people coming to the government saying, please, in this regulatory process, can we do these things? And that, I've sat through those things. You're in the bowels of the Copyright Office and I'm in this room going through all these hearings and that can be a lot of things, but that's not proper, right? That's regulation. I started my legal career as a regulatory lawyer and so I know what it looks like if it's pretty much the same thing. So it's only property so much as we treat it like proper and as I said, increasingly we're not doing that. So I mentioned the DMCA, Triennial Rulemaking, the fact that we don't have formalities. We also don't have what we now have in copyrighted, we call statutory damages. And those are sort of fixed arbitrary numbers that mean that if there's a violation of your right, you get some minimum, some maximum number, which is just more or less pulled out of the half by a judge and we don't do that with real property. If you trespass on land, if we get in a car accident and I injure you or I damage your car, if I destroy some property that belongs to you, no, a judge doesn't sort of pick a magical number out of a hat to say, this is how much you're entitled to. I have to show up and prove my harm. And this is sort of a common understanding of property is when one person has to compensate another for hurting someone or injuring or taking things, you have to demonstrate your injury. This is a common characteristic of a property that we've gotten rid of in copyright law. And perhaps there was some logic to it, but what's happened is that number seems like it's, it gets ratcheted up every year that it's the index for inflation in some developing country. And so every couple of decades we had a zero on hand and pretty soon you have these cases where there's $1 billion liabilities for technology companies, for example, that are being threatened for deploying new technology products. Again, this really doesn't look like property so much as it does in regulation. And then the last thing I'll mention is that sort of the DMCA triangle isn't the only kind of regulatory thing that the Copyright Act creates. We are right now in the midst of a discussion about the internet radio rates, which is, I think generally speaking, an example of government price-fixing. The way internet radio and all performance licensing is done is there's an argument or a proceeding for a government, a Copyright Office employee, a bureaucrat in the Copyright Royalty Board who after hearing from parties more or less sets a price and says, this is the price you have to pay for this good and that is, that's the price that's paid. There's no sort of free market negotiation and moreover, depending on the industry you're in, you pay different rates and so it shouldn't surprise people that the older the industry is, the more sort of established it is, you pay lower rates and newer industries like internet radio pay far higher rates. So we have this sort of classic example of a regulatory process that favors incumbents and discriminates against human rights and that's, again, not a very good example of property work. So there's solutions we can discuss for all of those things, but the one we, why don't we get back to it, okay? So thanks, I'm gonna throw my panelists out at this point. One of the things that I wanted to follow on what that was talking about, well, you knew something about some of the comparisons between thinking of copyrights and intellectual property as real property. I wanted to highlight instead a living tension between intellectual property and personal property and chance, the ability of people to control objects. And this is something that actually exists in tension with copyright law. For example, we give copyright owners the right to restrict certain uses of their works, to restrict the ability of people to reproduce them, the ability of people to make public performances of those works, the ability of people to distribute copies of those works and a variety of other things. On the other hand, if you're the owner of personal property, if you're the owner of channels, you should have the right to alienate those works, to alienate those things, those objects. I should be able to sell them. I should be able to give them away, lend them, rent them. I should be able to reduce them. I should be able to enjoy them as I want. I should be able to read a paperback that I own at whatever time I'd like, how I'd like. I should be able to run a computer program that I know or play an MV3. And the thing is, we actually see copyrights and those rights of personal property coming into contention with each other in a number of ways. So the right, the exclusive right of a copyright owner to restrict distribution, right? The fact that a copyright owner can say, you can't distribute copies of my book, comes directly into conflict with a consumer's right to have a lawful and made book and buy and sell it and rent it and lend it. We typically deal with that with the first sale doctrine. It's a piece of copyright law that's existed for centuries. And it says that the owner of a particular copy that's lawfully made gets to alienate that to where they want. They get to distribute it the way they want. The thing is, that resolution of this initial tension changes when we start talking about digital media. For example, my ability to lend or give away or sell something that I've bought as a digital file changes drastically because let's say I bought an MV3 off the web, I legally purchased a music track and it now lives, it's tangible assets. It lives as a series of bits on my hard drive. Now, if I bought a CD, I could give that away and that's not a problem, I could lend it and so on. What do I do with the file on my hard drive? I suppose I could give my entire hard drive to somebody or lend it to them, but what if I want to transfer that file to somebody else? Well, in that case, I'm making a reproduction of that file and that's not something that's included in the first sale doctrine. So, even if I were to send that file on to somebody else and delete all copies of it that I own, so I've washed my hands of it, I no longer own a copy of it that somebody else now has it. It's the same sort of one to one transaction as if I've just given them a CD and yet copyright law would call that an infringement. So the fact that we moved from a world of physical media to more of a digital media means that that tension between a copyright owner and the property owner is a little bit out of plan. Another example of how this works, I think nobody disputes the fact that somebody who buys a copy of a copyrighted work has to use that to get to player LP, to get to player DVD, read your book and so on. Now the problem, a problem arises when we're talking about digital media because pretty much every form of digital media that I'm going to use when I'm using copies that native it, that I run a computer program, copies of that computer program get made in the ram through the computer. If I play a movie that I bought it gets bothered or it gets, you know, copies of it get made when it's stored in long-term storage on my hard drive and chunks of that will get copied into ram because the hard drive isn't fast enough to play that movie to me. So every single time you use a piece of digital media music, movies and e-book, that work gets copies getting made. Now in 1980 Congress decided that we didn't want to hold every single computer user viable around a computer program so that these ram copies would result in infringements every single time. So we have in the law this exception that says that you can, that it's not the infringements. If copies are made of a computer program that's essential steps in the use of that program by the owner of that copy. Now a couple of problems are that in 1980 nobody anticipated that we'd have digital media that works computer programs. Nobody anticipated that the primary means of consuming media, of consuming copyrighted works was going to be digital copies. And so now every time I put play on an MP3 player, every time I put play to watch a movie on a computer there's an active question as to whether or not those ram copies are infringing. And that's something that law again doesn't account for. And this creates a thread of liability that persists throughout very visual works that we have. And as more and more works are more in a digital format and are going to be distributed on digital media like DVDs and CDs, we're going to see an increase in control of the distributor and the copyright owner and an increase in control of the consumer and the physical property owner. So that's a way in which I think we're starting to, because the law was written in certain ways, lose a balance between the purposes of the copyright law and its intent to balance the rights of the copyright and the rights of everyone else. So having set up these various issues and these various problems, I think we might start an open discussion, maybe start with Jerry and some of his ideas about what we might look for and where we're going. Okay, so I guess now we've sort of set up the problem and learned some solutions. I don't have sort of terribly prescriptive solutions. My interest is sort of mostly making the case that conservatives and libertarians should not be opposed to reform. And in fact, it should be leading this reform as part of a small government program. So that's, I can give you some sort of broad outlines. I think the first thing we should do is start out where we have a lot of common ground with folks who are more property rights oriented or the folks who are more reform oriented, what sort of common ground do we have? Recently in National Review, James B. DeLong, who's a law known conservative economist at the field of tech and telecom, he wrote an essay about TPRSC policy. And for those of you who know Jim DeLong, he is a very strong sort of property rights advocate and a very strong defender of copyright. I think he's testified that they were covered copyright enforcement in Congress. And so in his essay National Review, he disagreed with many of the arguments in the RSC policy, I think. But he has some things to say that worth. I thought I was just sort of refreshing the common ground that I spoke to. Here's what he said. I'm gonna quote Bear with me. I think this is important. I'm gonna quote him. He says, some of the specific problems noted in the paper in the RSC paper and elsewhere are very real. Copyright terms are too long. Rights are overly convoluted and hard to pin down. Transactions cost way too high. The easy availability of copyrighting is after failing to create a community or from works for which copyright holders are unknown and present problems. But list this long, you probably need a clean sheet rewrite of the copyright law. Now he goes on to not be very optimistic about getting that clean sheet rewrite. We'll probably take for that, I'm probably more optimistic. But boy, I agree with everything he's saying in there. Copyright terms are too long. You don't have any knowledge. So what does he propose? Well, he goes on. He has to specifically propose this. I'm gonna quote him again. Quote, many specific reforms should be enacted. My list would include shorter copyright terms, a requirement of registration and renewal to show seriousness, a one time requirement of registration of existing works to get rid of the work and work problem and centralized data pieces to reduce transaction costs. So now, that's just a long time who is again, conservative, concerned about property rights and very concerned about Congress. What he's saying matches up very nicely with the reforms that Tom DeVebel has outlined in our book. Tom DeVebel is a law professor and an expert in copyright at Chapman University School of Law. And he has several proposals that don't go through all. One is sort of escaping from the farm intervention. But among the others, he says, let's reinstate the Founders' Copyright Act, right? Do you remember? 1789, the Constitution was ratified, 1790, the First Copyright Act.  And you have them now, so you have to rest, you have to see that agreement. So given all that, I think we can see it as a broad agreement, certainly among those on the sort of big template, we think the terms are too long. The lack of formalities have created more and more some problem. And I would add to that that we need to be better, to have better due process in copyright enforcement, right? And so the libertarians have for years been concerned about to use passive work through laws to seize personal property by trial and the same is happening in our country. Thanks, Margo. Margo, I know you want to talk about a forfeiture, but you also mentioned the issue of formalities frequently, and that's something Jared just talked about. I was wondering if we could go a little bit into that. So the idea that you have formalities, it is the idea that you would require, like I guess before the U.S. Science and Burn Convention, it was a requirement for people to get a copyright that you would register at the Copyright Office for this. You'd have to go through a series of groups and pay with the, and so on. So I think the rationale for doing away with this is it would make it very difficult for people to get a copyright. So why would we want to re-institute that? Either of them would be good. Oh, I don't think we want to make it too easy. So this right now that I've written in some notes, this is now copyright. And so if anybody ever wanted to use this, I would have to license it to why create those transactions costs. We should make it a little bit difficult where if I, this is a serious work that I want protection for this, I should take a step. It's not, we shouldn't be an owner of a step. We have to earn that now. I could foresee in the future where formalities are back in place where I can go on my tool website and register running my work. Shouldn't cost too much, right? Because, again, it's going to be done digitally. But I should take some step to signal that I'm serious about that I want a copyright. So that's going to sort of shrink the number of works that are copyrighted to just that we actually want the copyright to be second. But it has sort of the effect of creating a register that it gets sort of the order of work from what we've been talking about. But also if somebody finds my work, at some point, wants to know if they get a license, if I'm going to be able to get it to find it. I just wanted to mention that one of the rationales for having no formalities internationally is that it was a hurdle where it was seen as a hurdle for an author to go into the new country industry with their work in the country and have to first register their work before it would be copyright contracted. I think with that rationale, I've been talking a lot about information costs and registries and what that looks like now versus what that looked like 100 years ago. A lot of rationale for having registration on an international level is disappearing and the cost of not having it tonight at this point would be higher. So you want to also talk about some of the issues about forfeiture. So I'm going to be really brief on my policies and projections. I think I'm out of two of three points I made. One is the speech point and the other is the trade point. So on the issue of speech, Zoe Loughman actually just put a proposal in front of Reddit, readers saying that she proposes putting some kind of amendment to the description of civil asset forfeiture in copyright law, which would require notice to web operators prior to the seizure of domain names and an opportunity for them to defend themselves before domain names are seized. I think that sounds like a fairly good proposal. The second area of trend forks is trade. Trade has two active issues right now. One is the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, progress of supervision or lack thereof. The other is the trans-specific partnership agreement and progress of supervision or lack thereof. Currently there is no fast-track authorization in play or a reasonable trade promotion authority. So the US trade representative's office is going off and negotiating a trans-specific partnership agreement with a number of foreign countries, actually fairly common right now, they're in New Zealand. And there's no sort of rule of law for how that negotiation is going to end up actually coming back to Congress or it is going to at all. The reason I say if it's going to is because USTR has claimed that the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement does not ever need to come in front of Congress. And that was authorized by the Pro IP Act of 2008, which is very questionable. And I want to flag the massive nature of, I was just writing earlier as the executive branch of my grad in this area. Harold Coe, who was my transnational law professor full disclosure when I was in law school, has gone around describing Congress's opposition to the ACTA as a quasi-constitutional custom, a widespread and consistent practice of executive branch activity that Congress finds conduct has essentially accepted. And Congress's conduct in this area is doing nothing.  If you would like to reassert control of the executive branch, please do something. That's a good idea. I do. So I actually didn't outline any sort of specific solutions and I do have some specific solutions that I'd like to put in front of all time. I also want to speak a little bit more not to belabor the point, but to the formalities issue because we keep talking about this. It's just fundamentally important. We encounter it every day, I'll say a half.  And then next week you start getting email from those guys. And you're like, I didn't think I wanted to email them. What happened is, is somewhere on the order form there was a box and it said, I'd like to get email from you about your updates and other interesting policy stuff or about what are their shoes yourself or anything. And the box was checked, it was pre-checked, right? You didn't check it, it started unchecked. You had to uncheck the box, you just didn't see it. Unchecking the box is opting out. So if the box is not checked, that's what we call an opt-in system. You have to make some sort of affirmative decision saying, I want this. And that's the way copyright was for a long time. The box was unchecked. You had to check the box. You had to make some affirmative step and say, you know what, I want my notes that I took today to be copyright protected. I wanted the emails that I'm sending to my colleagues to be protected. I wanted my Facebook posts and Twitter accounts. You had to check the box for all of those. And then the reality was, most of the time, you just didn't care about checking the box because nobody really wants 120 years of protection in their emails. Jerry doesn't want 120 years of protection in his notes. That is why. And so we sort of didn't have to worry about that. But then when you get rid of formalities, when you get rid of any need to go to the government or whomever and say, I want protection, that's like checking the box. Now you have to opt out of the system and say, I don't want this. Just the same reason you're getting those emails that you really didn't want. It's more trouble to uncheck the box often than it is to just deal with it. So what happens is every work, every time we fix something, every photograph you take, all those things are instantaneously protected whether or not the protectionally interests you. And what happens is that means that administrative costs, transaction costs, as economists would say, attach to everything instantaneously. And it's actually really hard to uncheck the box. So that's a policy choice we made. We went from an opt-in system to an opt-out system. And now we're finding that because people didn't opt out decades ago, it's really hard to use work. So press pool photographs from World War II. It's difficult to preserve those. They're rotting away in libraries, old films. The Holocaust Museum has preservation problems because they don't know who owns certain copyrighted works that they're in their possession. And it may well be that the owners are deceased and the survivors don't know that they inherited those rights. So these administrative costs have serious consequences. This is what we call the working works problem. And I think I publicly disagree with Jim DeLong on a lot of things, but on this issue, he and I are on the same page, that having an opt-out system has created a lot of administrative costs. So Congress has considered orphan works legislation in the past. It's actually gotten a lot of consideration that advanced substantially some years ago. And that's something that could be considered. Another thing that can be considered is, as I refer to statutory damages, reconsidering the circumstances in which those apply. Having them apply in all cases at all times, particularly in relation to secondary liability where you're suing a third party for something that somebody else did, that probably merits reconsideration. And finally, I think sort of deregulating, I don't mean deregulating the common sense, but getting away from the sort of regulatory nature of copyright is really important. And the Internet Radio Fairness Act is one example of trying to make copyrights administration more equitable and less sort of regulatory. We also discussed the DMCA-triennial process, which is very regulatory, and while there's nothing before Congress that they could address that, that's certainly something that could also merit consideration. So there are a number of solutions that can be explored. Those are just some discreetness about. Thanks. You know, actually, Matt, you mentioned the idea that it being sort of an opt-out system leads to all sorts of problems. It leads to an orphan works problem because you have all of these powers and penalties that are automatically assigned, whether you know who has the power to wield them or not, right? So some unknown person has a copyright in these photographs that need to be reproduced if they're going to be preserved. It leads to another problem, though, the fact that you have this opt-out system, and that you would end up with a system of liability that's incredibly powerful and incredibly pervasive. The fact that these notes are copyrighted, that my blog post was copyrighted, that my email is copyrighted automatically, means that I now have the ability to bring suit against somebody for making particular uses of those things. Somebody who forwards it on has made copies of it. Now, what sort of books do I have in litigation? Now, that might not go all the way, it might not be enough for me to prevail in court, but it's certainly enough for me to, without getting sanctioned, send a nasty letter to somebody threatening to tell them to stop doing whatever it is that they're doing and making fun of me. And that puts a chill on speech generally. It provides a means by which people can use our existing system. So that's, I think that there's some need to discuss what the remedies are that we have available for copyright and how flexible, how it could be made more flexible, how to get more certainty within those ranges that we have, those incredibly large ranges of damages that we have. Also, I think I was talking about the ability of consumers and the owners of copies to be able to make use of those copies to treat them as their personal property. I think making sure that we have amendments in place to the Copyright Act that let them do that, that will update the way that we can serve for the sale, the way that we can serve essential steps in using things digitally is necessary. People's ability to actually own the things that they bought, it's not just a consumer issue, it's just a fundamental issue of personal property. And that applies both to restrictions that have come up almost by accident by virtue of the way computers work. And it also applies to active restrictions that manufacturers will place upon digital media, such as digital rights management or other, or maybe contractual terms that you include in these long end user rights and agreements that contractually reward the restrict of how people can use their things, even though it's buried within pages and pages of 10 point text, that you actually, if somebody actually tried to read all of those texts, it would end up costing the country billions of dollars in productivity every year. So I think there's a handful of ideas that can be forward on there. I was just gonna say, you described, if you remember, the Amazon, the human example over there, were they actually also built from Dewey's novels? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah. So the fact is, if you buy a new book, you click a big button that says buy, you'd like to think that means that you actually own that copy of that book. But regardless of where the original lies in the title, since technologically, the publisher often has the ability to delete that from the Kindle or from your notebook, there were people who had bought copies of 1984 of all things on Amazon. And these copies of 1984 ended up disappearing down the memory hole because there was some dispute with the publishers and Amazon decided to remove them from people's Kindles. Actually, even more basically, somebody bought some books from Martin Noble and they had them on their notebook. And they canceled one of their credit cards. The credit card that they had used to buy those particular books. And since they had been identified by their credit card number and not by some other account, when they canceled that credit card, the book disappeared. So there's many ways in which some of them legally, some of them technologically, people are having less and less control over the things that they thought. So unless the panel has any more thoughts to add to this, I welcome any questions in the audience. Such as the registration requirement. So would you be imposing a more honorous option requirement or you said that that was an option requirement as it applies to all revenue? So the point is that this is true that in order to propose a statutory damage is one will need to register to work. Of course, that generally doesn't happen until litigation is contemplated. So the vast majority of the life of the vast majority of works, there is no registration unless the right holder did so ahead of time. So in the example that Sharon referred to about say, intimidating litigation. So one example that comes to mind is the voting machine manufacturer, D-Bolt, was, had technology was compromised more or less. And so it's possible to commit vote from by messing around with the machines. And so an advocacy organization put these emails which leaked that more or less, I think acknowledged the problem but didn't do anything about it on the internet. And they, the voting machine company attempted to suppress this conversation by bringing copyright litigation against the advocacy group. So people wouldn't know their machine was compromised. Now that suit, statutory damages isn't really an issue. And practically speaking as a litigation matter, you don't have to perfect your registration in that case in order to send people a lot of nasty letters. So it is true that if you want statutory damages, you got to jump through the hoops in the copyright office but from a practical matter, you're intimidating a fact of litigation to be achieved one before you have to write your registration. I think also part of your question was, is it's overpurposing more or less? And the answer is no, because right now the folks who are serious about exercising the copyrights and wants to literally take a cap to register is exactly what we're proposing. We're saying people who are serious about their copyrights should, you know, basically if you want that privilege, you should sort of signal that's what you want. So it's no more or less. Now me, I don't want to exercise my copyright over my notes. So I don't need to register. So it's not any more or less for me because I'm not going to follow the copyright for this and yeah, that's fine. That's right. If you want protection, no problem. You can have protection, all you have to do is just go to a website, fill out a form, you can have protection for me. Finally, that, don't have to do it. So just one nice detail on that report. When you have an opt-out versus opt-in system, it really, it says a lot about what you think the majority of people are on their want. So generally speaking, you have to opt-in to magazine institutions, right? It's not like so many magazines start showing up in your house and you have to send them all back, but that would be really onerous because the reality is you probably don't want many magazines, maybe a few of them, well, sorry. The one place where we have to opt-out and everybody thinks it's a hassle is junk mail, right? I mean, it's a hassle.  I just moved getting a ton of junk mail in my house because I just couldn't help it. If you haven't gotten an opt-in out and sending the notice to the direct marketing association, those guys say stop sending me junk mail. So I'm not getting a lot of magazines in my house. We get any wire, but not a lot of others, but I am getting a lot of junk mail, right? Because the sort of how we set the default rule represents what we think here. And so the way we have the default rule set right now, it represents our policy assumption that everybody wants protection over everything and all the time. And that's probably something that merits re-examination at a very philosophical level. But that means you don't have to wrestle with that very complicated, not complicated, but very foundational question before you start looking at other sort of narrower cases that we've talked about. Do you think that there's actually any way for digital goods or items without sort of also dealing with some sort of a technological mechanism or software-based mechanism to ensure actual transference occurs? I don't think you need to have that in the legislation necessarily. I mean, if you want to have, if you want to make it legal for somebody to forward and delete, you can do that without requiring forward and delete systems as long as you make it so that intent matters, so that how that transfer happens matters. And you know, the idea of intent mattering in areas of copyright liability isn't a radical one either. I mean, you can see how it applies in very use, right? Anytime that you're asking whether or not something's of fair use, you're asking what the intent was of the use. So I mean, I think we don't have requirements when people sell CDs online that there'd be some sort of enforcement mechanism to make sure that they never copy it. You don't have an enforcement mechanism with something that sells a book to make sure that they have a Xerox stick in the past. So I don't think that needs to be built into the statute. Now, certainly we want a system where if somebody reported to be doing forward and delete, and they never did delete part of it, they'd still be liable. I don't think that's a difficult statute for this. So I know that a number of proposals for reform encounter severe obstacles because of treaties. Treaties that when they're sold, they may be sold on the basis that they don't require any changes in US law, but also they don't permit any changes in US law. And I'm told that in the TPP, for example, even though most people think that the current copyright extension to life was 70 years was a mistake, at least the draft that was leaked last year of TPP would mandate globally the mistake that we made, which might not require a change in the law, but would prohibit us from fixing that mistake in US law. On formalities under the Byrd Convention, on copyright term under trips, I think it was, on the copyright term as it may be extended further in TPP, how do we make these changes? You know, yeah, that's an excellent question. And I think it depends, some of these changes are harder than others. I would imagine that where you have sort of explicit remedies for countries against each other for violation for breach of terms of a particular agreement, it gets a lot harder. So we try to not copyright terms back below the burden minimum would actually be very difficult. On the other hand, if you're talking about just agreements that are sort of or that don't necessarily have trade penalties between countries, it's basically a question of asking, well, if another country wants to consider the laws of the United States and breach, they might do that and can have an association on that. In the meantime though, it's really not the place of the US trade representative or the executive branch to determine what the laws of the United States are. That is entirely in Congress. So my short answer is I think you've been on exactly the major problem with policy reforms in this area, which is that we're stuck based on what USTR is doing in this direction and so on. No, so I certainly have to suggest that I think it would violate international obligations. So we could rationalize our statutory damages. There's no international strength there. In fact, most countries don't have statutory damages. And we go around saying, well, you should have something like this and then, you know, fund use that. Getting away from our sort of regulatory price facing approach that we see in copyright and the copyright work proceeding. Certainly, getting away from the system that discriminates against one industry or another. There's no strength there. Making our DMCA process a little bit less bureaucratic, we have engaged in some free trade or bilateral free trade agreements. And generally, the DMCA part of it has been one of the more controversial parts. So we do have some flexibility to fix those things. There's a lot of things that we can do without running a file of international obligations. Although it is true that we have tied our hands on some of these questions like formalities and the sort of the long term. Even our, the fiber property that our previous register or copyrights acknowledged that it comes to take this long. But yeah, we do have international obligations on that that sort of set the floor there. And that's unfortunate, but we can work around some of the problems with these other cases too.  You know, sometimes I can be a good thing, but I think the main point isn't so much that we should just go forward and do this, but that just because something's been included in a bilateral free trade agreement, that it's been sort of part of the template that we've used in international negotiations before doesn't mean that it's something that we need to accept as we give and never to be negotiated and never to be addressed again. The policies of the United States change over the years. The laws of the United States change over the years. And the same should be true of what we push for in our international agreements. I would agree with what everybody said, and maybe I'll be the more sort of full-stop optimistic here and say that we can really negotiate, so we can. It all sort of matters what the United States and what you certainly consider it. Yeah. You guys have talked to a certain extent about when the universe is at a year, basically. If you don't like it the way that it is now, and how much shore should it be, or on what levels or what is, you know, just sort of, and what's the market equilibrium there, I guess, in order to still make sure that the author is, you know, has the ability to be properly compensated for their work versus their political work. I mean, I think it's, as I said, it's a very, very tough capital to do because there's so many parameters that you have to consider, such as the length of the term, but it's also to have them now with what sort of things are included in copyright versus what sort of different moving parts. Look, I was commenting. Tom Bell recommends that we go back to the founder's copyright. It's 14 years, we need to workforce more for the 28 years of protection. I think the answer lies somewhere between, you know, that, because it's called a floor, and it's called what we have now, ceiling. So somewhere between that, I think it's a lot closer to that beginning than it is to what we're now. So it's something that has been exercised for Congress, but we're way past whatever that in the following analysis, I think. I think it also might be nice to shift the burden of proof a little bit to the current distribution system and ask what we're getting out of those extra last years of copyright protection protection, because I think there's not, to my knowledge, a whole lot of evidence about what 70 years after death does versus what 50 years done, sort of 30 years done, sort of 20 years does. Yeah, I can just say one thing, that this is a variable, which is really odd. So a 10-year-old who has come to think that today if I was to copyright and lived to be 100, gets his life to 70 years, now a 70-year-old who if I was to copyright today and dies tomorrow. It gets completely different for the same types of works as completely different works, that's not rational. Those are very least. They should be sort of system-typed and things like that, so we all are the same. So the whole reason why we went to this sort of life of the author plus the term was in part designed, to protect heirs, and the thinking was, oh well, we wouldn't want these author's children to be penniless, because then the author dies and suddenly they lose all their protection. So we'll protect the heirs of him, so that's what we have in the language. And then we decided, well, we should protect the heirs and the heirs, and the heirs, and the heirs, and the heirs, and that's how we get a 70-year-old, which is sort of providing protection for the great-grandchildren of Robert Frost or whatever. So if you're wondering why we came up with that for a long time, I don't know if that's why. But to follow up on the question, the length of the term is one of the problems, but it's also the fact that there's no need to show up and say that you're still interested. So I don't pay my property taxes. If I demonstrate to the district company that I'm no longer interested in my house, there's a mechanism whereby they come along and they say, well, we can put this line to better views. There's actually a great example that Michael Huller describes in his book, Rilakkakon, where in the 50s, some serial company bought off neighbor land in the Yukon. They divided it up into inch-sized parcels, and they put the land to the inch of the Yukon and serialized all these different kids. It's like kids around the country were all excited because they only own each of the Yukon. Well, I mean, not surprisingly, most of those kids didn't pay their property taxes on their each of the Yukon. So what happened? Yes, it happens. And so what happened is, is the Yukon government was like, hey, yo, I don't need to pay taxes on this land. Well, maybe they seized it. And some smart guy sent a bag of toothpicks to the government and said, can you fence in my inch and I'll pay back the property taxes? But I mean, look, the vast majority of these people were really interested in this. And so we had this assembly mechanism, this was sort of Huller's point, that the administration of the property is a natural assembly mechanism when people demonstrate that they don't have interest in the property anymore. And there's no obligation on our systems that demonstrate you're still interested in their property. So if you had people had to come back and say, I'll pay a penny, I still want my copyright, a lot of people wouldn't do that and not to fix a lot of these problems. It's that you give the right and there's no obligation to demonstrate interest over a century. That's, it's the two things working together. It's the problem of absence of any sort of registry system and formality and the long term. It crosses this problem. Yeah. Oh, just with regards to the term line, I think there's, taking the founders fortune of fortune as a minimum, I think it makes some sense. I mean, just as a lower bound of what we're looking at. A lot of commercial copyrighted works, their value in exploiting them by the copyright owners is really the vast majority of them is recouped within the first few years of their release. There was a study fairly recently, and I'm afraid I'm right on by whom that suggested that most of the value of the vast majority of works will be gotten harder within the first 30 years of its existence or so. That's just one study. There's going to be numbers that will vary depending upon all sorts of variables, but I think it suggests that we are, that that's not a bad place to start looking. I mean, how this is going to sort of follow the one that you just said. Now this contract has, or registration requirements, you have to show up and say, I want the transaction. And at the end of those 14 years, you have to say, I want another. And the vast majority of folks who said they wanted the first 14 years didn't show up to ask for the second 14 years. And so it went into the public domain. And so to your point, if nothing else, that opting in, so that you could keep, this is not what I'm going to have again, it would be better if you just keep the terms that we have now, but maybe so that every couple of years you have to say, I want it. So you keep the same term. But by making sure you have to go in and opt in after 30 years, if that's the case, that's when you get exhausted. 30 years from now, people are really going to pay for my vibrates or probably not. So at that point, stop registering copyright and it goes into the public domain where anybody can use it. And there's all sorts of variants you can have on proposals like these. I don't think there's any sort of hard and fast rule. One of the things we can do is also we can adjust the amount of the availability of certain types of remedies, depending upon whether you're able or not. What sorts of damages, what sorts of injunctions are available to you depending upon whether or not you've exercised, and if you express that desire to continue exercising your copyright. Actually that's a good point because not to really geek out, but the international law generally leaves the countries their own choice about what remedies to provide, how to administer the systems. So if you want to adjust the remedies that are available based on registration, probably no international legal constraints to do on that. So I think we've gone past an hour or so. If there aren't any other questions, does anybody have an item or what is it like to wrap up? So I'd like to thank you all again for coming. Again, this is just the beginning of a much longer, much broader conversation there. I'd love to continue to do in the coming months and let the years to come.


Suspense, light, auto light, and its 96,000 dealers present Mr. John Lund in Experiment 6R. A suspense play produced and edited by William Spear. Friends, I know you've enjoyed trouble-free summer driving. If you've replaced those old-style narrow-gap spark plugs with white-gap auto-light resistor spark plugs. Tell them why, Harlow. Tell them why. Auto-light resistor spark plugs with the exclusive built-in 10,000-ohm auto-light resistor give you a full, even spark all along the line of fire. Keep going, Harlow. You're doing great. Well, your engine idle smoother with auto-light resistor spark plugs performs better on leaner gas mixtures, actually saves you gas. You're getting better all the time. Auto-light resistor spark plugs cut down radio and television interference, too. So insist on auto-light resistor spark plugs. Okay, Harlow. Given the old punchline. Don't be satisfied with spark plugs supposed to be just as good. Get genuine auto-light resistor spark plugs. You're always right with auto-light. And here's a reminder, suspense may be seen on television in many parts of the country every Tuesday night. And now with Experiment 6R and with the performance of John Lund as Morris Brandt, auto-light hopes once again to keep you in suspense. Entirely fitting somehow that here in the Carlton Plaza hotel where he spent so much of his life, we should honor this hero of science and pay him our rumble gratitude. Mr. Brandt is, as you know at this moment in our special clinic, and it's from there that he will address us on the subject of Experiment 6R, a page in the progress of science with which his name will forever be associated. When I received his letter and heard the thrilling news that, unknown to any of us, a human volunteer had actually... Well, it was, of course, inevitable that I should call this distinguished gathering together. I won't speak any longer now because minutes are precious. We're ready. Will you speak to us now, Mr. Brandt? Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Morris Brandt. Brandt speaking. I don't know exactly how you good people of science are going to take my little story. The history of my own part in Experiment 6R. When I finish my story, if I finish it, you will wonder perhaps why I wish to tell it at all. Well, something about the irony of this situation appeals to me. I'm going to enjoy every minute of it. You know, even the fact that somebody just now pressed a buzzer and I jumped to attention and started speaking is ironic. Because I guess that's how Experiment 6R began a couple of months ago. Yes, just like that. Brandt speaking. Coffee, Mr. Brandt. Very well, sir. It was precisely 3.15. And 3.15 was the time for Mr. Paul Koblenze's afternoon coffee. Naturally, it was beneath the dignity of the manager of the Carlton Plaza Hotel to have the coffee served by anyone less than me, the assistant manager. And so each day, the coffee tray with its silver urn, silver sugar and creamer, silver spoons, and graceful emoj cups was left on my desk by a waiter ready for the humiliating ceremony. I picked it up and went in. Oh, Mr. Brandt. You'll join me, of course. Thank you, Mr. Koblenze. A little coffee is very relaxing. It was relaxing for him. My duties only began with bringing in the coffee. I had to set the silver tray on his desk and then wait while Mr. Koblenze detached a small key from his desk chain. Then it was my job to take the key and open the small wall cabinet near the heavily draped window where Koblenze kept a supply of liquor. I would take out a bottle of expensive brandy and carry it over to the desk. Koblenze liked to dash of it in his coffee. Thank you, Mr. Brandt. It was this part of the silly ritual that I hated most. That locked cabinet was a symbol of Koblenze's suspicion and distrust. No one but me was ever permitted to enter his sacred office and I didn't drink, but that made no difference. The liquor was expensive and might be stolen. By whom? By me. Mr. Brandt, I've been looking over the monthly accounts. Your latest innovation seems to be doing quite well. The stag room? Oh, that was a lucky guess. I think not.  It seems, Mr. Brandt, that you have the rare talent of knowing what people want. Well, I hope so. Especially when giving people what they want can be so profitable and lead to give you what you want. Yes, indeed, Mr. Brandt, you have a very successful record during your 12 years here. Perhaps too successful. Why? What do you mean? Success has the habit of making a man crave something further. I think we shall have to have a talk someday soon, Mr. Brandt. But that will be all for today. You may replace the brandy. He handed me the little key to the cabinet. He had finished with me for the day. Back in my office, I thought of what Mr. Koblenz had said. Too successful meant only one thing. He thought that I was ambitious to hold his job, my only possible advancement. Mr. Koblenz was quite correct. I would do anything to have that job. Anything. Now, after 12 years of it, I was determined to have that job. Not because it was a better job, but because it was his. I didn't sleep well that night in my cramped inside room, thinking of Mr. Koblenz in his penthouse suite. But finally it was morning and the hotel came to life again with all its problems. There were the usual two or three bad checks accepted by the night clerk and all the other boring commonplace irritants. The only drama of the day was brought in by the housekeeper. May I speak to you a moment, Mr. Brandt? Yes, Mrs. Obben? It's about 14.02, Mr. Brandt. What seems to be the trouble? The maids won't make up 14.02. Why? The room... I know it sounds crazy, but that room is full of rats. Live rats? Nonsense. The maids are imagining things. No, it's true. I saw them myself. Very well, Mrs. Obben, and I'll see about it. Everyone's afraid to go in 14.02, so I hope you can get them out of there. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Brandt. Live rats. What next? Room clerk, please. Hello? Brandt speaking. Who is the occupant of 14.02? Dr. Tomlinson? Is he in his room? Well, when he returns to the hotel, please let me know. I shall have to speak with him. Well, it was fairly typical of the kind of problem which is automatically relayed to the assistant manager, being hardly glamorous, nor important enough for the manager to be bothered with. Some difficult and taxing assignment like greeting Greer Garson, maybe, would be more fitting use for the time and talents of Paul Koblenz. As I thought about it, and him, I began to hear a sound in my head like a clock ticking. I recognized that it was almost 3.15. As busy as I was, I could sense, without looking at a clock, that it was nearly 3.15. It was time for the buzzer on my desk to sound out the call which symbolized all the tyranny, all the pompous authority, and the warped sadistic soul of Brandt speaking. Coffee, Mr. Brandt. Very well, sir. Again the humiliating ritual. Performing the services of a waiter to satisfy Paul Koblenz of his authority. And today he began the talk with me that he had been promising for so long. Mr. Brandt, you have been with us for 12 years. Is that correct? Yes, Mr. Koblenz. 12 years and two months. And you have always impressed me as an ambitious man, a competent man. Well, thank you, sir. I must realize that you have come as far up the ladder as is possible, at least while I am alive. Well, I don't think so. And I am a very healthy man for my age, Mr. Brandt. Eventually you may replace me, but it will be a long time to wait, I'm afraid, a very long time indeed. Well, I'm really awfully busy, Mr. Koblenz. I have observed certain signs of restlessness in you during the last year or so. Restlessness? You are not satisfied to be merely the assistant manager. You dream of occupying this desk someday, my desk. Will that be all, Mr. Koblenz? I will tell you when you may go. You would like to have my salary, which is very considerable instead of your own, which is a good deal smaller. I must say that no one is so well qualified. If anything should happen to me, you would automatically be appointed manager of the hotel. Mr. Koblenz, I'm sure I never... We will not discuss the matter further. I just wanted you to know that I know, as they say, what the score is.  I have finished my coffee, Mr. Brandt. Good afternoon. It was exactly 3.30, as Koblenz handed me the little key to the cabinet, and I replaced the brandy. I took the coffee things back into my own office and closed the door. I knew exactly what Koblenz had meant. He had actually said, I know you would like to eliminate me in some way, and I warn you, I'm on the alert. Don't try anything funny if you know what's good for you. As if there were the slightest chance. As much as I hated him, there was nothing I could do. Mr. Brandt speaking. You asked me to call when Dr. Tomlinson returned to the hotel, Mr. Brandt. What? Oh, oh yes. Thank you. Oh yes, sir. I am Mr. Brandt, doctor, the assistant manager of the hotel. May I step in for a moment? Yes, comrade. What can I do for you? Well, I suppose you noticed your room hasn't been straightened, and of course it's not difficult to see the reason why. You have them caged, I see. Oh yes, yes. You mean my rats. They're beautiful specimens, aren't they? Beautiful. How did you get them into the hotel? The cage fits into a leather carrying case. Rather clever, isn't it? I see. Well, I'm sorry, Dr. Tomlinson, but I'm afraid those rats will have to go. Yes, dear me, I was afraid of that. But only be for another day, Mr. Brandt. I'll be returning to New York tomorrow. I can't leave them now. They're the subject of an experiment that may lead to the cure of an extremely deadly disease, which, for scientific purposes, we refer to as six R's. Well, I'm sure, doctor. Let me show you something here. Take a look at this label. Uh, para dimethyl... Doctor, I really don't... Para dimethylaminos benzamine. It's commonly called a butter yellow, Mr. Brandt.  And by the time the results are evident, the rat is past all hope, and in a very short time it's dead. Yes, doctor, it's very fascinating, I'm sure. I'm afraid... Oh, will this powder induce six R in a human being too? Almost certainly, but naturally we haven't been able to try it. No volunteers. I don't suppose it requires very large doses, either. To develop six R? Oh, no, indeed. Just a very tiny bit daily, and then... Mr. Brandt Schiller, you understand the importance of this work and why I must have the rats with me constantly. But if you insist, I shall move to another hotel, of course. No, doctor, I represent the management, and I ask you to stay. And I'll see that your room is straightened. Well, I must say that's wonderful of you, Mr. Brandt. Are you interested in science? Not until now. Oh, by the way, please tell the maid not to go near the cages. Sometimes the rats might bite, and it might be that they could transmit six R that way. We're not sure you understand, but it's better not to take any chances. Is that powder... I won't attempt to pronounce it. Is it quite safe in here? Oh, yes, yes, see? No one could find it here. I see. And besides, no one would know what it was. If some got lost, it looks just like yellow dust. It would only be thrown away. I have more for the experiments. Don't worry, Mr.... A brandt, yes. Well, I'm sorry if we've inconvenienced you, doctor. Oh, have you had dinner? I... No, as a matter of fact. Oh, would you join me? Seven o'clock in the grill room? Well, I should be very pleased. Good. We'll talk some more. You know, I should think that someone who, well, is desperately ill, let us say, would be honored to be your volunteer. I know in similar circumstances, I should be proud... until seven, doctor. Wish to see me, Mr. Brandt. Yes, Mrs. Overman. It is very important that Dr. Tomlinson finish his stave. Yes, sir. I will meet the chambermaid in his rooms promptly at 7.15, and see to it that the rats don't frighten them. Thank you, Mr. Brandt. The doctor arrived exactly at 7. And at 7.10, while he was still sipping his sherry, I excused myself and went up to 14.02. When the chambermaid was taking the soiled linens to the laundry wagon in the hall, leaving me alone in Dr. Tomlinson's room, I filled a hotel envelope with a deadly yellow powder. I was back downstairs before the soup was served. I have never enjoyed a dinner more. Dr. Tomlinson prattled on, but I didn't even hear. I was thinking what a pleasure it was going to be to have coffee at 3.15 tomorrow afternoon with Mr. Paul Copeland. AutoLite is bringing you Mr. John Lund in Experiment 6R, tonight's production in radio's outstanding theatre of thrills, Suspends. Say, Hap, my nephew went to camp this summer and they taught him a lot of useful things, like how to send smoke signals with a brush fire and blanket. You should see the lovely charred hole in our living room rug. Yes, but did they teach him about the new wide-gap AutoLite resistor spark plugs? No, Hap, they didn't, so I had a man-to-man talk with him. I told him, replace old-style narrow-gap spark plugs with wide-gap AutoLite resistor spark plugs easier starting in cold temperatures for smoother idling. For better performance on leaner gas mixtures, they actually save you gas. That's useful information. Right, I told him, confidentially, of course, that every AutoLite resistor spark plug has an exclusive built-in 10,000-ohm AutoLite resistor. I said, insist on AutoLite resistor spark plugs now. Don't accept spark plugs that are supposed to be as good. That's telling him. I said, my boy, that mighty-mite that AutoLite resistor explains why AutoLite resistor spark plugs mean easier starting in cold temperatures, smoother idling, better performance on leaner gas mixtures. They actually save you gas. So insist on AutoLite. And now AutoLite brings back to our Hollywood soundstage John Lund in Experiment 6R. A tale well-calculated to keep you in suspense. Brand speaking. Coffee, Mr. Brand. Yes, Mr. Koblenz. A waiter had just brought the tray, set it on my desk and left. My door was locked. I took out the envelope with the powder, put a pinch of it into one of the costly Lamoge cups, filled both cups with coffee from the silver pot, and carried the tray into the sumptuous office next door, the office that would soon become my own. You will join me, of course, Mr. Brand. Of course, Mr. Koblenz. Of course I would. I always had, but beginning with today, I would enjoy it. There was not the slightest alteration in the usual ridiculous routine. Koblenz removed the little key from his chain and handed it to me. I got the brandy from the cabinet. Koblenz poured a bit of the brandy into his cup and took a sip. Hmm, exceptionally good coffee today, Mr. Brand. They make it yourself. What? Why? How do you mean? Oh, don't take me so seriously, Brand. But knowing your efficiency in all matters of the hotel, I'm sure you could prepare a very unusual cup of coffee. Well, that's very nice of you to say, Mr. Koblenz. But I know you haven't time to waste making coffee. Too busy thinking of ways you can work your way into my job, aren't you?  Yes, surely. More coffee, sir? Nothing could possibly go wrong. I had found out enough from Dr. Tomlinson to know that humans, and I stretched a point to include Paul Koblenz, that humans responded to drugs in very much the same way as rats. That was the reason rats were used for experiments in medical research.  But the powder would never be detected. Only its effect. When, after months of tiny doses, Koblenz would suddenly learn that he was harboring the hidden killer. Six-hour. I kept the powder in my jacket pocket. As the weeks passed, it became a matter of routine to put some in Paul Koblenz's daily coffee. But try as I would to remain calm. Sometimes the excitement of it would become almost unbearable, particularly at the moments when I served the coffee. Mr. Brandt. I can't tell you what pleasure this afternoon cup of coffee gives me. And, of course, it gives me one of the few chances I get during the day to see my busy and toasty assistant. That is a pleasure, too. Thank you, Mr. Koblenz. Oh, I received a letter a few days back from a Dr. Ernst Tomlinson. Tomlinson? He was a guest here, I believe, for several days. Oh, really? Well, I... Surely you haven't forgotten. He wished specifically to be remembered to you. The gentleman with the rats. Rats? Oh, yes, I do recall something. Yes, of course. I realize, Mr. Brandt, that I have allowed many of my managerial duties to fall on your capable shoulders. Which action has perhaps given you a mistaken opinion of your authority on these premises? But really, Mr. Brandt, live rats in a room. The animals were caged? I think I should have been consulted. All the guests were not cognizant of the fact that we were, for two days, zookeepers of a sort. If they had known, I'm afraid, Mr. Fenwick should have immediately replaced you. I'm sorry, Mr. Koblenz. Yes, I am sure. The good doctor seemed quite taken by you, Mr. Brandt. Have you a personality side you've never shown me? I've always considered you rather dull. Will that be all, Mr. Koblenz? You're angry. Well, no matter. See, yes, that would be all. I'm rather tired today. Go, please. Dr. Tomlinson had written. But only to compliment me. That was good. He hadn't missed any of the yellow powder. As far as Koblenz's insulting behavior was concerned, well, there wouldn't be much more of it. Dr. Tomlinson had said there were no outward effects to 6R. The tiny admission of fatigue on Paul Koblenz's part was I felt it. I only drove progressively more faster than 12 miles. Two weeks into the fourth month of the experiment, 6R. And in a way I didn't expect, the last scene began. Under the insurance laws of our state, all employees participating in group insurance had a yearly physical examination. The four months Dr. Tomlinson had considered necessary to allow the growth of 6R were almost completed. By now, 6R would have taken hold of Paul Koblenz, sufficiently to be recognized in a medical examination, and sufficiently to be at that point incurably fatal. Even at this late date, there were outwardly no signs of Koblenz's illness, which would make the announcement by the insurance doctor even more shocking. It was a nervous moment. Brand speaking. I have set aside 230 as the time for my visit to the insurance doctors. That should get me back to my office for coffee, after which, if you have no pressing duties, you may... Yes, Mr. Koblenz. At 3 o'clock, I heard him come back into his office next door. He walked rudder heavily, I thought. I wanted desperately to see him at once, to see the reaction he must have to the news the insurance doctors had given him. But I waited. Finally, it was 3.15. Brand speaking. Coffee, Mr. Brand. Yes, Mr. Koblenz. The waiter had brought the coffee tray as usual. I carried it in. Koblenz sat quietly at his desk, his face partially in the shadow from the drawn blinds. You'll join me, of course, Mr. Brand. Oh, thank you, Mr. Koblenz. Here's the key. I set the tray down, took the little key to the liquor cabinet which stood against the wall, and bent over to open it. There was a new mirror above the cabinet. And when I saw it, it made me drop the bottle. Anything wrong, Mr. Brand? You seem startled. The cups. The cups. You've turned absolutely white as death. But then I meant to talk to you. You haven't been looking well for some time. You changed. I beg your pardon. You switched the coffee cups while I turned away to get your brandy. I always do. It is an old custom in my family, an old German custom, a very old and long-lived family. Have you all this time? Yes, Mr. Brandt. All this time. Operator, connect me with the insurance doctors, please. In 308. Is it possible for you to see Mr. Brandt immediately, doctor? Thank you. It's urgent. And so experiment six hours finished. I'm glad to have been of service to science. But I just couldn't die without sharing the credit with Mr. Koblenz. I'm truly sorry that he could not be there with you today in his old capacity as manager of the hotel. But Mr. Fenwick saw fit to discharge Mr. Koblenz when it was brought to his attention that live rats had been permitted to spend the night in one of our rooms. And now, thank you for your attention and good-bye. I was just bringing you order, Mr. Brandt. Your friend just phoned and told me if you'd only mentioned it before... Friend? Mm-hmm. Mr. Koblenz. Koblenz? But I didn't order anything. Oh, now, Mr. Brandt, it's no trouble. We know now about your little custom. If you want coffee at 3.15 every day, you shall have it. Come now. It's just 3.15. Suspense presented by Autolite. Tonight's star, John Lund, in Experiment 6R. John, do you mind if I ask you a question? Of course not, Harlow. Okay. What do you think of Autolite resistor spark plugs? Well, Harlow, let's put it this way. Yes. I can't imagine you selling anything but the best.  You just keep right on telling people that Autolite resistor spark plugs are the best. Any more questions? No, John, and thank you. I'll also tell people that in its 28 plants from coast to coast, Autolite makes more than 400 products for cars, trucks, airplanes, and boats, including complete electrical systems for many makes of America's finest cars, batteries, spark plugs, generators, starting motors, coils, distributors, all engineered to fit together perfectly, work together perfectly because they're a perfect team. So friends, don't accept electrical parts supposed to be just as good. Insist on and get Autolite original factory parts at your neighborhood service station, car dealer, garage, or repair shop. Remember, you're always right with Autolite. Next Thursday for Suspense, Charles Lawton and June Havoc will be our stars. The play is called Blind Date, and it is, as we say, a tale well calculated to keep you in suspense. Tonight's Suspense play was produced and edited by William Speer and directed by Norman MacDonald. Music for Suspense is composed by Lucian Moraweck and conducted by Lud Bluskin. Experiment 6R was a radio play by Donald Stubbs and Harold Cowell. John Lund may currently be seen in the Hal Wallace production for Paramount by friend Irma. In the coming weeks, you will hear such stars as Van Johnson, Edward Arnold, and Betty Davis. Don't forget, next Thursday, same time, Autolite will present Suspense, starring Charles Lawton and June Havoc. You can buy Autolite resistor spark plugs, Autolite staples batteries, Autolite electrical parts at your neighborhood Autolite dealers. Switch to Autolite. Good night. This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System.