Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians – Full Dimensional Stereo
Speaking of slimy music corporations, remember when this happened?
“As a sound recording.”
Margaret Cone read that innocuous-sounding legislative language and her heart skipped a beat. The time was last November, during the closing days of last year’s congressional session. Cone was a veteran Washington lobbyist.
She’d been tipped off that an amendment to a pending bill — quietly inserted without debate — would reclassify under the nation’s copyright laws all sound recordings, like cassettes and CDs, as “work made for hire.”
If true, that slight change would mean musicians would never again be able to own their recordings. Instead, record companies would become the sole legal owners of a record over its legally copyrightable life, currently 95 years.
Talking to a friend on the phone as she sifted through pending legislative bills, Cone recalls having “a sinking feeling that something wasn’t on the level.” She checked one bill that dealt with copyright; no mention of work for hire. She sifted through another, Title I of the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, and found nothing.
Then, “on a fluke,” she went to the buried “definitions” section of that second bill and there she found this:
“(e) WORK MADE FOR HIRE-Section 101 of title 17, United State Code is amended in the definition relating to work for hire in paragraph (2) by inserting “as a sound recording.”
“My knees literally gave way,” says Cone, who often represents artists on Capitol Hill and instantly understood the ramifications of the proposed copyright change. “I told my friend on the phone, ‘I gotta go! I gotta go!'”
She dashed to the offices of the Courts and Intellectual Property Subcommittee to try to get some answers. “I wanted to find out how bad it was,” she recalls.
That was Nov 16. Two days later, despite Cone’s frantic back-room protests and pleas, the work-for-hire amendment, attached to a massive 1,740-page omnibus spending bill, passed the House and Senate. President Clinton signed it into law Nov. 29.
Early this August1, after months of public and often hostile debate, the record companies, lead by the Recording Industry Association of America, finally agreed to ask Congress to essentially repeal the work-for-hire amendment Cone discovered that day.
The battle represented a rare victory for musicians on both Capitol Hill and in the business arena.
(click here to continue reading Four little words – Eric Boehlert – Salon.com.)
Kraftwerk – Electric Cafe
- 2000 [↩]