No hearings were held, no public debate took place and no member of Congress sponsored the act. Glazier, who now works for the RIAA, consulted only a handful of congressional assistants last fall. He was able to make the change because he explained the alteration was non-controversial and technical in nature.

"Nobody thought much about it," says Jay Cooper, an attorney at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, and who represents the Artists' Coalition.

Looking back, the process was "an extraordinary" one, says Boucher, an 18-year veteran of the Hill. "It's very unusual to alter a substantial right without the affected party having the opportunity to know what is being proposed and to comment on what's being proposed. Artists were never consulted."

In the past it often took years, even decades, to alter copyright law, as the concerned parties hashed out just the right legislative language.

The RIAA has a defense of its seemingly surreptitious move. The group argued that a technical clarification was needed in order to enforce a much-needed cyber-squatting bill, which artists such as Henley had lobbied for.

That law makes it a crime for Web users to extort artists who want to claim their name domain in cyberspace. Since the law revolves around works for hire, the RIAA added sound recordings to that list in order to make the cyber-squatting legislation work for musicians as well.

The irony is that the language of the cyber-squatting law was later expanded, so even though the work-for-hire amendment will in all likelihood be repealed this year, that change won't affect the once-central cyber-squatting law. In other words, the clarification the RIAA argued was so important, and the one that set off an artist revolt, in the end turned out to be completely unnecessary.

Artists manager Ron Stone, whose clients include Bonnie Raitt and Tracey Chapman, never bought the cyber-squatting argument in the first place: "Record companies have earned our scorn over many years of taking advantage of artists at every possible turn, so the level of suspicion is high," he notes.

The manager suspects the work-for-hire action had more to do with mergers and acquisitions. "Vivendi is buying Universal and AOL is buying Time Warner," Stone says. "The values of these companies are determined by assets, and those assets are the ownership of the master recordings. I think record companies are covering their asses and don't want any loose ends 13 years from now when artists start recovering the ownership of their records."

Stone is referring to another key element of the 1976 Copyright Act, which went into effect Jan. 1, 1978. Under the law, after 35 years, "authors" who transfer away their rights have a second chance and can recapture ownership. That means in 2013 the first artists contracts signed in 1978 will be triggered, and record companies could face a run on their masters. (Of course, it is possible many artists will renegotiate with the labels and continue the relationship they had had for the previous 35 years, assuming the royalty checks had been arriving on time.)

If sound recordings were classified as works for hire, though, the labels would have nothing to worry about in 2013, because artists would no longer be able to recapture their rights

Sherman at the RIAA says it's not that simple. He and others in the music industry are confident that the way the Copyright Act is currently worded there will be no run in 2013, even if the "sound recordings" work-for-hire amendment is repealed. Record label lawyers, as well as some outside legal scholars, argue that records already fall under the work-for-hire category of "collective works" or "compilation," and that when the first 2013 test case winds up in a court, a judge will side with them.

"There is so much ambiguity about what work for hire is," concedes Stone. But the secret amendment move was unconscionable, he says, and the artists' seeming victory is merely the latest battle in an ongoing war: "So we're back to squaring off with the record companies and arguing over this issue. All we've done is gotten them to take their foot off our throats."

Given artists' beleaguered past track record in boardrooms and up on Capitol Hill, that counts as an accomplishment.

Just look at how the crucial May 25 subcommittee hearing began, with Chairman Howard Coble, R-N.C., leveling this charge at an absent Henley: "I hope you get carpal tunnel syndrome from counting all the money you make, compliments of the Copyright Act and the Congress which wrote it."

Henley answered in the press that Coble was "perpetuating the plantation mentality that has forever plagued our industry." (A source says Coble's volley was written by a staffer who mistakenly believed Henley had been trashing the representative behind his back.)

Two days before that hearing, Henley's first studio album in 11 years arrived in record stores. He used the title track to vent his frustration over the work-for-hire saga:

It was an inside job
By the well-connected
Your little protest Summarily rejected
It was an inside job
Like it always is
Chalk it up to business as usual
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

Henley, as it turned out, was one of the catalysts of the Billboard campaign. A longtime friend of Billboard editor in chief Timothy White, Henley early on called for a complete investigation into the work-for-hire amendment. (Full disclosure: I was a staffer at the magazine under White from 1992 to 1995.)

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