Maria Pallante, Head of US Copyright Office, To Meet With Music Creators: Exclusive; Billboard, 12/18/13

Billboard; Maria Pallante, Head of US Copyright Office, To Meet With Music Creators: Exclusive: "The Recording Academy is convening leadership roundtables between music creators and U.S. Copyright Office register of copyrights and director Maria Pallante. The initiative ties in with Pallante's stated goal of hearing from the various stakeholders -- leading performers, songwriters and studio professionals -- of the current discussions on copyright. The roundtables will begin in New York on Jan. 14 and will continue to other Academy chapters contingent upon on the availability of Pallante and her team. The roundtables are part of a larger review of copyright law begun this year by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee... In the following Q&A, Pallante discusses the many music copyright issues now under review, her office's role in creating copyright legislation and the challenges ahead... What kind of timeline are you expecting for the discussions that lead up to actual action by Congress? I don't know. [Goodlatte] had six hearings, if you include the one he gave me, since March. We haven't had that many copyright hearings in a very, very long time. And he's announced three more. In the next few months there will be one on the scope of exclusive rights, there will be one on the scope of fair use, and there will be one on notice and take down provisions of the DMCA... We've got other provisions we've been working on for a really long time. We've been working on the public performance in sound recordings issue for a decade, if not longer. We've got orphan works issues. We've got pre-'72 sound recordings that we think should be federalized. We've got analog library exception rules that don't translate into the digital age."