The Copyright Office last week issued its Report to Congress on pre-1972 sound recordings (with an Executive Summary), addressing whether to bring these recordings under Federal law. As we wrote last year when the Copyright Office solicited comments on the issues raised by this report, sound recordings (i.e. aural recordings embodied in some fixed form like a CD, record or digital file) created in the United States prior to 1972 are not protected under Federal copyright law. Instead, any protections accorded to these sound recordings are under state laws. Congress, at the request of a number of archivist and music library groups, asked that the Copyright Office review the issues that would be raised by bringing these sound recordings under Federal law. Some archivists and librarians feared that, in preserving old recordings, they could run afoul of state copyright laws, and that a unified set of rules under Federal law might be easier to follow. Why is this issue more broadly important to the music community? For internet radio station operators, it is because the proposals to Federalize all such recordings could have an impact on digital performance royalties (as there does not appear to be any public performance right in sound recordings under state laws and, under current law, these recordings would not be covered under the SoundExchange royalties that most noninteractive services play). The Report is also significant in that it raises questions about copyright laws dealing with user-generated content, specifically whether the DMCA safe harbor provisions protecting the operators of Internet service companies from copyright liability for the content posted by third parties apply to pre-1972 sound recordings.