The Copyright Office has written extensively on the enactment and operation of the cable and satellite licenses, and I will not go into the details here. See The Cable and Satellite Carrier Compulsory Licenses: An Overview and Analysis (1992); A Review of Copyright Licensing Regimes Covering Retransmission of Broadcast Signals (1997). The reasons offered for enactment of the cable and satellite licenses, and compulsory licenses in general, are essentially economic ones. For the cable license, Congress believed that the transaction costs associated with a cable operator and copyright owners bargaining for separate licenses to all television broadcast programs retransmitted by the cable operator were too high to make the operation of the cable system practical. Unlike a broadcast station which negotiates directly with the copyright owners for the programs it transmits over-the-air, cable systems carry multiple broadcast stations, raising substantially the number of copyright owners the cable operator would have to bargain with for retransmission rights. The transaction cost problem was exacerbated by the cable industry's lack of market power in 1976.