William Patry Muses On SIRA

The Patry Copyright Blog:

This week, if the House of Representatives marks up its "Section 115 Reform Act of 2006" (affectionately called SIRA), we may get a lesson about whether copyright rights may be frogs and fish; that is, whether one act may implicate two different rights. Since at the least the the debates in the early 1990s on providing a digital audio transmission right in what became Section 106(6), this issue has been the subject of contention, first by the performing rights societies, who wanted to make sure that rights granted to record companies didn't diminish money paid to them under Section 106(4), and second with the amendment to Section 115 expanding the compulsory license to include digital phonorecord deliveries: could a transmission be both a performance and a distribution, and more to the point, could two payments be required for the same transmission of the same work?

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