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 August, 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.

Those who fought against it argue the chapter provides strong evidence that given the opportunity, record companies will do whatever they can to give artists the financial shaft.

"It was very sinister at its root," says former Eagles leader Don Henley. "We never should have had to go through this. But the RIAA thought they had enough clout in Congress to make it stick. And they almost did."

When asked for comment, record company representatives pass questions to the RIAA.

But the association, so vocal in its fight against Napster and its alleged theft of copyrighted material, is far less animated when it comes to the work-for-hire amendment. "The book needs to be closed on this issue so we can get back to a united industry on so many important challenges of the day," said RIAA president and CEO Hilary Rosen in a prepared statement.

Privately though, there is still lots of finger-pointing going on. For many involved, the power struggle left a particularly bad taste. "It reinforced a lot of ill will," says folk singer Dar Williams, one of 46 musicians and managers who fought the work-for-hire amendment by joining a group called Artists' Coalition, lead by Henley and Sheryl Crow.

"There was a real outrageous quality to it," said Williams. "What were they thinking?"

Meanwhile, an ongoing debate simmers over the role Billboard magazine played in the whole episode. From the moment it unearthed news of the amendment last January, the music industry's dominant trade magazine, long suspected of being a voice for major labels, has owned the story, running nearly a dozen, often critical, cover dispatches.

"I think Bill Holland should win a Pulitzer Prize," says copyright attorney Jay Rosenthal, with the Washington law firm Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe. He's referring to the magazine's Washington bureau chief, who has been covering Congress for 19 years and wrote all of Billboard's work-for-hire news stories. "He did a phenomenal job."

Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., agrees: "We probably would not be where we are today, on the verge of reinstating an artist's right, if it had not been for the Billboard reporting."

Others insist that in its zeal to right a perceived wrong, Billboard crossed an important line. "Their coverage was completely one-sided and inflammatory," says RIAA executive vice president and general counsel Cary Sherman. "They were not acting as journalists but rather as advocates, and they did damage to everybody and to the issue."

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The issue at hand is the 1976 Copyright Act. Among other things, the law spells out two types of relationships between employers and creators. One represents a clear-cut, long-term association based on full-time employment. Under that scenario, anything that a person creates while working for his employer (i.e. an article a staff writer produces for a magazine) belongs to the employer, not the worker.

The second type of relationship is more short-term and complicated. There, Congress spelled out nine categories that would be considered what the law calls "works for hire." The law decrees that material created as work-for-hire belongs to the employer, not the individual.

There are a lot of common publications and artistic work that are legally viewed in this way -- encyclopedias, movies, translations, compilations, atlases and instructional texts among them.

The small "sound recording" change was crucial. Ironically enough, virtually every recording contract signed today already includes a clause stating that the artist's contribution is a work for hire, which means the music belongs to the record companies.

But the same contracts also include provisions whereby if the artist transfers his rights to the label, after 35 years he or she will have a chance to terminate the contract and recapture his rights. With the new amendment classifying "sound recordings" as works for hire though, the artist loses that recapture right under the Copyright Act. Instead, record companies would become the sole "authors" of those works for the life of the record, or 95 years, according to today's copyright law.

That's not a notion that sits well with artists. "There is no confusion in the record industry as to who creates the sound recording," said Crow, testifying before Congress during an after-the-fact hearing in May. "It is the featured artists."

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