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mon law until fixed in tangible form. Because of the significance of this principle, the committee amended section 301(b) of the 1965 bill to make it explicit.
The preemption of rights under State law is complete with respect to any work coming within the scope of the bill, even though the scope of exclusive rights given the work under the bill is narrower than the scope of common law rights in the work might have been.
Representatives of printers, while not opposed to the principle of section 301, expressed concern about its potential impact on protection of preliminary advertising copy and layouts prepared by printers. They argued that this material is frequently “pirated” by competitors, and that it would be a substantial burden if, in order to protect himself, the printer would have to register his works and bear the expense and bother of suing in Federal rather than State courts. On the other hand, these practical problems are essentially procedural rather than substantive, and the proposal for a special exemption to preserve common law rights equivalent to copyright in unpublished advertising material cannot be justified. Moreover, subsection (b), discussed below, will preserve other, legal grounds on which the printers can protect themselves against “pirates” under State laws.
In a general way subsection (b) of section 301 represents the obverse of subsection (a). It sets out, in broad terms and without necessarily being exhaustive, some of the principal areas of protection that preemption would not prevent the States from protecting. Its purpose is to make clear, consistent with the 1964 Supreme Court decisions in Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. Stiffel Co., 376 U.S. 225, and Compco Corp. v. Day-Brite Lighting, Inc., 376 U.S. 234, that preemption does not extend to causes of action, or subject matter outside the scope of the revised Federal copyright statute.
The numbered clauses of subsection (b) list three general areas left unaffected by the preemption: (1) subject matter that does not come within the subject matter of copyright; (2) causes of action arising under State law before the effective date of the statute; and (3) violations of rights that are not equivalent to any of the exclusive rights under copyright.
The examples in clause (3), while not exhaustive, are intended to illustrate rights and remedies that are different in nature from the rights comprised in a copyright and that may continue to be protected under State common law or statute. The evolving common law rights of “privacy,” “publicity,” and trade secrets, and the general laws of defamation and fraud, would remain unaffected as long as the causes of action contain elements, such as an invasion of personal rights or a breach of trust or confidentiality, that are different in kind from copyright infringement. Nothing in the bill derogates from the rights of parties to contract with each other and to sue for breaches of contract of however, to the extent that the unfair competition concept known as “interference with contract relations” is merely the equivalent of copyright protection, it would be preempted.
The last example listed in clause (3)—“deceptive trade practices such as passing off and false representation”—represents an effort to distinguish between those causes of action known as “unfair competition” that the copyright statute is not intended to preempt and those
