Don Henley On Copyrights, Termination

Gearing up for an inevitable battle with major record labels.

By Fred Mills

Eagles motormouth Don Henley is rarely our go-to guy in day-to-day BLURT matters (well, maybe when we need tips on upcoming Wal-Mart sales). But there's no questioning his intelligence and, pertinent to the matter at hand, ability to be an effective advocate when there's a cause he's passionate about. Last month we reported on the looming battle between record labels and artists over song rights; scores of musicians are soon to be potentially eligible to gain ownership of recordings made over 35 years ago, and needless to say, in the instances of, say, the Eagles or Bruce Springsteen or any number of ‘70s mega-selling stars, there's a lot of money that stands to be put on the table for artists and labels to go to war over. See this excellent New York Times story about the "termination rights" situation.

Yesterday at RollingStone.com, Henley weighed in during a revealing interview, and it's well-worth reading. He's convinced the aforementioned battle will in fact take place - gentlemen, start your lawyers, or as Henley puts it, of the labels, "They're not just going to roll over" - but he's also equally convinced that musicians are in the right. A couple of his better quotes:

On Musician's Options: "Artists have several things they can do. They can re-up with the label and use this as leverage to renegotiate a recording agreement. They can invoke termination rights and take back their master recordings and see what they can do themselves. If they get it back, they can shop it around and see if anybody else wants it - another label or an indie label or they might market it themselves on the Internet. Or artists can go back and re-record everything."

On Artists' Point Of View Versus Labels: "Record companies insist sound recordings are "work for hire" and artists are employees of the companies. Which is a real interesting claim because we don't enjoy any of the benefits or obligations a normal employee would be granted. They don't provide health insurance for us. They don't pay Social Security for us. They don't withhold taxes from our royalty checks. They don't provide us a place of employment. It's a real stretch for the record companies to claim we're employees. We're independent contractors."