Mr. DAVIS. Your proposition brings up the question of public performance. I say that the composer's rights are limited under existing laws to all benefits which he may receive from his visible, readable "writings" expressing his original musical conceptions, and that he can make copies of it in any manner he sees fit; but he has not the right to usurp the rights of an inventor to reproduce that music through self-acting mechanical means in public or private. The inventor has a peculiar field here. The Constitution, as I would translate it, in layman's language, says: "Now, Mr. Inventor, if you can come in and invent a machine in which the melodies that would otherwise be lost can be forever preserved and reproduced to the public for the public benefit, you shall be protected." This includes public performances. We do this in a way that does not decrease Mr. Sousa's income, but increases it, as I have explained. Mr. WEBB. If a man goes to a store and buys a piece of copyrighted music he expects to have the right to sing it and play it anywhere he pleases; otherwise, what does he want to buy it for? Mr. DAVIS. That is the human agency. Mr. Sousa's compensation may or may not cover all human agencies for reproducing that music, including public performances, and concerning which the inventor is not specially interested. The inventor should have the right to all mechanical agencies, where the human agency does not enter into it in any way whatever, including public performance. Mr. WEBB. Well, they say you can use your mechanical devices wherever you please, just so you do not use their music. Mr. DAVIS. Well, Mr. Sousa is not construing the laws. I am telling you my idea of the laws, as I understood them when I entered into this art ten years ago, and as the courts have sustained them right up to a few days ago. Senator SMOOT. Mr. Davis, as I understand you, you would not object at all to paying a royalty for any music that you may use upon any instrument that you may have invented or produced, providing that that same royalty is paid by all other concerns or individuals, and that all other concerns and individuals may have the same right to use it as any particular one that the producer of the music may even try to designate himself? Mr. DAVIS. Individually--and I believe I represent the class of inventors affected by the proposed act--and without retreating from the stand I have taken regarding our present rights, I would not object, because I recognize that remote ethical right which you are casting about to secure and deliver over to the composer together with the many other new gifts in the bill. If you can protect it in some such way as will meet my many objections, we inventors will be satisfied, but I am constrained to say that I think your efforts will be futile. The CHAIRMAN. I think that is all, Mr. Davis. You can submit in writing any further statement that you desire to make.