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3. The high ratio of exports to imports could change very quickly without a manufacturing requirement. Repeal would add to the balance-of-payments deficit since foreign publishers never manufacture here. The U.S. publishing industry has large investments abroad, and attacks on the manufacturing clause by foreign publishers, show a keen anticipation for new business. The book publishers’ arguments that repeal would have no real economic impact are contradicted 'by their arguments that the manufacturing requirement is stifling scholarship and crippling publishing; their own figures show a 250 percent rise in English language book imports in 10 years.
On balance it appears that, although there is no justification on principle for a manufacturing requirement in the copyright statute, there may still be some economic justification for it. Section 601 represents a substantial liberalization that will remove many of the inequities of the present manufacturing requirement. The real issue that lies between section 601 and complete repeal is an economic one, and on purely economic grounds the possible dangers to the American printing industry in removing all restrictions on foreign manufacture outweigh the possible benefits repeal would bring to American authors and publishers.
The committee is aware that the concern on both sides is not so much with the present but with the future; and, because new machines and devices for reproducing copyrighted text matter are in a stage of rapid development, the future in this area is unpredictable. Outright repeal of the manufacturing requirement should be accomplished as soon as it can be shown convincingly that the effects on the U.S. printing industry as a whole would not be serious. Meanwhile the best approach lies in the compromise embodied in section 601 of the present bill.
Works subject to the manufacturing requirement
The scope of the manufacturing requirement, as set out in subsections (a) and (b) of section 601, is considerably more limited than that of present law. The requirements apply to "a work consisting preponderantly of nondramatic literary material that is in the English language and is protected under this title," and would thus not extend to: dramatic, musical, pictorial, or graphic works; foreign-language works and bilingual or multilingual dictionaries; public domain material; or works consisting preponderantly of material that is not subject to the manufacturing requirement.
The term "literary material" does not cannote any criterion of literary merit or qualitative value, it includes catalogs, directories and "similar materials."
A work containing "nondramatic literary material that is in the English language and is protected under this title," and also containing dramatic, musical, pictorial, graphic, foreign-language, public domain, or other material that is not subject to the manufacturing requirement, or any combination of these, is not considered to consist "preponderantly" of the copyright-protected nondramatic English-language literary material unless such material exceeds the exempted material in importance. Thus, where the literary material in a work consists merely of a foreword or preface, and captions, headings, or brief descriptions or explanations of pictorial, graphic or other non-literary material, the manufacturing requirement does not apply to
