Bob Stock <bstock[_at_]ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> Does the fact that this particular legislative history intent is
> only cited in two cases mean something? As a student, I am
> interested in the interaction between statute and legislative
> history, and I wonder what the professors (Tyler, of course,
> included) and the practitioners think? Should we, in this instance,
> automatically assume that the legislative history is binding or
> close to it? If not, how should it be interpreted?
I suppose that I'm one of the legislative history "answer grapes" around here. In general, most courts do interpret H.R. Rep. 1476, which is what Tyler cited, as authoritative as to the intended meaning of the 1976 Act, and the frequency with which a given passage of the Report has been cited doesn't seem to be probative of how influential the next court will deem it to be. Courts are less likely to pay attention to other legislative documents or to copyright hearing testimony, but rely on it sometimes. (E.g., CCNV v. Reid and Mills Music, to name two Supreme Court cases.)
Most of the language of legislative history, of course, including the House Report, was written not by members of Congress or their staffs, but by lawyers for affected industries and instititions who negotiated the substance and language of the 1976 Act with each other, so it is a little tricky to describe it as reflecting "congressional intent." (We all do it, nonethekess, since it's a convenient form of shorthand.) In any event, and regardless of who drafted it, the legislative history of the 1976 Act is very good evidence of what the people who wrote the statutory language believed it to mean, so copyright practitioners and professors find it very useful when we are trying to sort out for ourselves what a particular provision was intended to mean. Most of us find ourselves having to do that a lot, even if we've been at this for a bunch of years.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 26 2007 - 00:35:25 GMT