On the other hand, the bill tends to reduce the aggregate fees payable by any one publisher and the aggregate receipts of the office by enabling a number of volumes of the same work, and in the case of photographs, prints, and like articles, an entire series, if registered at the same time, to be registered for a single fee.
The other matter is that of copyright deposits. The volume of these is now prodigious. During the last year alone the articles deposited exceeded 200,000 in number. A large proportion of these are of great value to the Library and are drawn up into it. The rest remain in the cellar. The accumulations in the cellar now number a million and a half items. Many of these would be useful in other Government libraries; for instance, medical books in the library of the Surgeon-General's Office. Some of them might be useful in exchange with other libraries. A few might have value in exchange with dealers. The remainder are a heavy charge upon the Government for storage and care, without any corresponding benefit. They ought to be returned to the copyright proprietors if they want them, or, if not wanted, destroyed. Such dispositions are, I believe, already within the authority of law; but it is fair that they should be expressed. The bill (secs. 58 and 59) definitely expresses them. I ask your attention to them in due course. They have been accepted by the conferences, and therefore by the interests outside of the Government most nearly concerned with their operation. But they may awaken some apprehension elsewhere because of a quite common misunderstanding of the significance of the deposit and its relation to the copyright protection.
The original purpose of such deposits was the enrichment of the Library. This is clear from their history, both in this country and abroad. They were made a condition of securing copyright, but they had no continuing relation to the copyright once secured. In England, for instance, the copies required (now five) are to be for the use of the libraries--five libraries--no one of which is the office of registration for copyrights. The earliest act in this country was that of Massachusetts, in 1783, which exacted a copy as a gift to the library of the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, "for the use of said university," which was not the office of copyright. The earliest act providing for deposit in the Library of Congress, that of 1846, provided that the copyright proprietor should give one copy of the book to this Library, and at the same time it provided that he should give one copy to the library of the Smithsonian for the use of that library.