The U.S. House of Representatives, on Tuesday, passed a bill aimed at offering musicians the ability to reclaim ownership of their old recordings from the record labels.

Last year, Congress sneaked in a provision, on a completely unrelated bill, that changed a law regarding the ownership of old recordings. Pressured by the ever-loving Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Congress rewrote things so that, basically, all sound recordings are considered “work for hire.” What this essentially meant is that the artist has absolutely no rights to reclaim their works from their record label.

Prior to this, 35 years after a song has debuted, the artist can reclaim ownership of the recording from their record label and do what they want with it. If they want to release the song on Scour Exchange or Napster, then they would be free to do so. Not anymore, however.

The screwed up thing about the addition of that statement was that Congress added it without one public hearing on the subject. Congress, as well as the U.S. Copyright Office, claim that they added it because they felt that they simply enacted into law what was already considered common practice.

“Hah,” said artists, who were highly upset and started a campaign to get this moronic change to existing law overturned. Don Henley, for one, believed that a huge potential loss in royalties would occur, and thus became one of the more vocal artists against this provision.

"We said from the beginning we did not intend to change the law and have worked diligently to assure that the issue of work for hire is resolved without prejudice to anyone's position," said Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the RIAA. "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." We all know that their stance is merely cloaked in a shroud of rhetoric, aimed at ensuring that they do not lose face. I tell you what; I definitely raise the bullshit flag on this statement!

The bill now moves on to the Senate, who is expected to pass it as well. Once passed in the Senate, the bill will then be enacted fairly soon thereafter, thus reverting the law to its former state. This would mean that musicians would be able to retain the ability to reclaim ownership, assuming that there are no contractual provisions stating otherwise. However, knowing the record labels, and what sticklers they are, they probably write this kind of crap (yes, it IS crap) into contracts all the time – to ensure that they can retain the ability to wreak the revenues generated from timeless classics.

Expect to see litigation on this, between artists and record labels, in the future…