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Don Henley's 'Inside Job' Ponders Love, Work, Copyrights and Wrongs Exclusive: His Warner Debut is Diary, Manifesto by: Timothy White
In
1791, the framers of the U.S. Constitution made it a vital tenet of the
Bill of Rights that "a well-regulated militia being necessary to
the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed."
Over
200 years later, our former frontier culture is drastically altered,
with a mammoth infestation of private and often illicit firearms being
grossly unnecessary to the security of a free state. Indeed,
contemporary lawmakers should actually be concerned with safeguarding an
equally vital tenet of citizens' personal dignity: The right of the
people to keep and bear intellectual property. As Don
Henley sings on the fierce title track of his forthcoming fifth solo
album, "Inside Job" (Warner Bros. Records, due May 23),
"While we are dreaming/This little island disappears/While you are
looking the other way/They'll take your right to own your own
ideas." That
Henley, a self-made man with savvy intellectual property-owning
experience that parallels the freely acquired wealth of this nation's
founders, is sounding an alarm about these issues is necessary and
appropriate. As a former member of the Eagles, he's a key composer on
"Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975" (Elektra), certified
by the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA) as the best-selling
album of all time. Back
in the 18th century, prominent American entrepreneur/leaders of the
American Revolution like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Noah
Webster, and Thomas Paine were acutely aware in matters of public policy
and private commerce that land would be the primary source of wealth in
their new nation, and they believed the right to acquire and defend it
must be vigorously enforced. In the
21st century, the primary source of wealth will not be the Internet, the
stock market, or the music industry, but rather intellectual property --
the so-called "content" that lends all of the above any real
substance. We are
entering an era in which the power of individuals (rather than
multinational corporations) to acquire and control ownership of
intellectual property is under threat from those who would like to
control the new mono-market of Web-propagated entrepreneurism. Since
slavery has only been outlawed since the mid-1800s and copyright laws
have only existed in Western culture since 1710, the window of human
dignity and property-holding personal empowerment on this planet has to
date been disturbingly brief. Meanwhile,
human dignity itself is for sale as never before, with everything from
personal spirituality, the institutions of marriage and the family, and
the evils of racism and misogyny being exploited and/or excused in the
relentless pursuit of profits. The merits of loyalty to ideals and
lonely adherence to principles are being incessantly belittled and
cynically undermined by “inside jobs” in government, in the
workplace, tin the arena of culture, and in the once-private province of
our homes. On
"Inside Job," Henley is also addressing a matter that became a
pivotal spark for the title song. It was the insertion of a four-line
technical amendment in an omnibus appropriations bill last November at
the request of corporate record industry lobbyists the RIAA -- without a
prior public announcement that would have allowed either withdrawal or
formal congressional debate. The insertion amended the 1976 Copyright
Act to add sound recordings to the limited list of legal categories of
"works made for hire." Thus,
on Nov. 29, 1999, President Clinton signed into law a bill retroactive
to July 1, 1999, that essentially makes "employers," i.e.,
record companies, the sole authors/owners of recordings where
"works for hire" are concerned and not the artist who wrote or
recorded them. Barring any specific individual contractual language to
the contrary, this law could also theoretically affect prior contracts. As
Henley told Billboard in January, "This was inserted with no
comment from the artistic community or artists. Not even Congress was
involved; it was done by a congressional staffer [who was later hired as
an executive by the RIAA]. "I
can certainly understand where a film company would consider a film to
be a work-for-hire; a film is a huge collaborative effort involving a
great many people," he said. "But in the case of a record
company, it's often only dealing with one artist, such as myself, who
writes, performs, and produces his own record. For a record company to
claim, simply because it gives an artist an advance and puts up a little
marketing money, that it then owns that artist's work or that copyright
in perpetuity is preposterous and outrageous." Two
months after the story of this quietly inserted but historically
sweeping law broke, the RIAA acceded to public calls in Billboard by
such artists as Henley, James Taylor, Deborah Harry, Coolio, Mary Chapin
Carpenter, and Jon Bon Jovi for hearings to discuss overturning the law,
and it sent lawmakers a face-saving public statement urging such a
hearing -- given what it termed the "sincere and strongly held
views" by artists that the provision "substantially changes
the rights of artists under copyright law." Yet the RIAA continues
to insist the supposedly "clarifying" provision "simply
restates existing law." The
RIAA presses the "clarifying" point because the revised 1976
Copyright Act, which took effect in 1978, included a clause allowing
artists to recapture rights for non-"work for hire"-stipulated
recordings starting in the year 2013. Thus, even if acts as diverse as
Buddy Guy, Carlos Santana, Christina Aguilera, Mariah Carey, or the
Roots had never owned their master recordings before, they could be
assigned those rights under the Copyright Act's termination-act clause. This
is why there have also been public calls to repeal the RIAA copyright
amendment by such legal experts as former BMI president/CEO Edward W.
Cramer, a member of the American Bar Assn.'s Copyright Legislation
Committee who participated in the years of studies and hearings leading
to the 1976 revision of the Copyright Act. On
this Mother's Day, May 14, there will be a Million Mother March on
Washington to protest the proliferation of firearms that is putting our
children at mortal risk, but there is another occasion, tentatively
slated for mid-May, that merits support and attendance: the hearings on
the RIAA-sponsored "work for hire" amendment that dares
"clarify" that a recording artist cannot be the author of his
or her manufactured creative efforts. The
time has come for fans and industry professionals alike to make plans to
join Henley, colleagues Sheryl Crow and Billy Joel, and the rapidly
expanding coalition of other performers and supporters assembling to
protest this civil injustice. If you have ever admired a song, a record,
a book, a play, or any other creative work and felt its authors had a
right to control its destiny, and if you have ever created such a work
yourself or wanted to, you should go to Washington to let your voice be
heard. Don't wait to see if your neighbor is going -- go alone, in the
company of your own conscience, the way the democratic process is
ideally meant to be. And on
May 23, do yourself another favor and buy a copy of “Inside Job,”
produced by Henley and Stan Lynch; it is a touching, disturbing, and
galvanizing album by an artist whose success has not dulled his
instincts as a firebrand. On a comparable front, Henley has repeatedly
and effectively sounded the alarm to protect both the environmentally
threatened Walden Pond area in Massachusetts that inspired
naturalist/abolitionist/civil disobedience advocate Henry David Thoreau
and the extensive writings Thoreau left behind. History
teaches us all that intellectual property can change the world, a notion
not lost on President Jefferson, who was also the primary author of the
1793 Patent Act. Political theorist and pamphleteer Thomas Paine was the first
important figure to advocate independence for the American colonies, and
his hugely successful “Common Sense” and other writings (“The
Crisis,” “Rights of Man,” “Age of Reason”) were among the most
widely disseminated and influential tracts in American history. But the
72-year-old Paine, a prime mover with dictionary lexicographer Noah
Webster in the institutionalization if U.S. copyright, died destitute in
1809. Paine’s
lifelong poverty was a direct consequence of his idealistic but
personally calamitous decision in 1776 to donate the copyright and all
royalties of his global best seller “Common Sense” to charities
allied with the American cause of independence. His friend Webster took
a dim view of such kindly but recklessly precedent-setting gestures, and
Noah proved prescient, since over two centuries later, “Common
Sense,” like Webster’s own dictionaries, remains a steady-selling
work. As Webster saw it, “The production of genius and the imagination are if possible more really and exclusively property than houses and lands and are equally entitled to legal security.” For Paine, call it the 18th-century intellectual-property equivalent of the end of the innocence.
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