“To amend title 17, United States Code, to secure the rights of visual artists to copyright, to provide for resale royalties, and for other purposes.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section establishes a new resale royalty right under copyright law (17 U.S.C. §106B) for the author of a work of visual art (i.e., a painting, sculpture, or similar work as defined in 17 U.S.C. §101) upon its commercial resale by an art market professional (i.e., a person in the business of buying and selling visual art to the public) for $5,000 or more, independent of the author's exclusive rights under 17 U.S.C. §106. The royalty equals the lesser of 5% of the sale price or $50,000 (with the cap adjusted annually for cost-of-living increases based on the chained CPI for urban consumers from calendar year 2024), payable by the art market professional to a designated visual artists’ collecting society within 90 days of final payment. The society must distribute royalties quarterly to the author or author’s successor (with detailed inheritance rules prioritizing spouse, then children/grandchildren), net of reasonable administrative costs; unclaimed royalties are held in escrow pending good-faith location efforts. The right lasts for the work’s full copyright term and applies to resales of the original or limited edition copy after its first sale.
This section exempts works of visual art from copyright notice provisions. (As background, such notices, if properly affixed to published works under current law, prevent defendants in infringement suits from asserting an innocent infringement defense to mitigate actual or statutory damages.)
This section requires the Register of Copyrights to conduct a study on the implementation of this Act and submit a report on the results, including any legislative recommendations, to the Senate and House Judiciary Committees not later than five years after the date of enactment.