Mr. O'CONNELL. Under the existing law, as it has been decided in the White-Smith suit, the cutter of music rolls can go anywhere and take a piece of music, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, and cut the roll from it. That is my understanding of it, without paying any royalty to anybody. The CHAIRMAN. And the gentlemen and concerns you represent desire the law to remain in that condition? Mr. O'CONNELL. I have not said that, sir. What we say is this: We want to be able to go out in the open market and buy our music rolls. We will not be in that position if this bill goes through, because with these contracts that I speak of we can not go into the open market, as there will be no open market whatever. The distribution of these music rolls will be in the hands of one house, and that house can put its own price on them, or refuse to sell them to us at all at any price. In other words, in passing this bill in its present shape, you are fostering too great a centralization of power, or putting an absolute monopoly into the hands of one group of men. That is our objection. If some means can be devised whereby we get in on the same basis, whereby we can buy our records or our perforated music sheets as Mr. Currier said, on the same terms as anybody else, we have no fault to find, then. The CHAIRMAN. How can law prevent Mr. Sousa from making a contract with the Æolian people or any other concern that he may desire to deal with? Mr. O'CONNELL. The law can not prevent him from making any contracts he chooses with them, provided he does not contravene the law of the land itself. He can make any contract he chooses for any price he chooses. But there is the unfortunate situation: Mr. Sousa and Mr. Herbert, and gentlemen situated as they are, naturally ought to be in a position, I suppose, where they have liberty of contract; but in passing a law the greatest good to the greatest number must always be considered. If you pass this bill you do some good to these gentlemen, you do a great deal of good to the monopoly, you do absolutely no good to the vast majority of the authors, and you do a great deal of damage to a great many millions of dollars interested and invested in manufacturing industries in this country, even if you leave the purchasing public out of consideration altogether. It is a question of which you will take, unless some means can be devised to eliminate those particular features. Taking the bill itself, it was stated here by Mr. Putnam the other day that the object of this bill was to give a copyright on music rolls as to musical compositions composed after the passage of this act. That was my understanding of what he said. Mr. PUTNAM. Copyrighted afterwards, I think I said.