During the 1970s, Congress debated a major revision to the copyright laws, culminating in passage of the Copyright Act of 1976. ASMP lobbied for the provision of the Act that automatically grants copyright to the creator of a work. (Under previous U.S. law, copyright was dependent on registering the work with the Copyright Office.) Likewise, in the late '90s ASMP lobbied in favor of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which brought U.S. law into conformity with the international Berne Convention treaty by extending the term of copyright to the life of the creator plus 70 years.