Mitch Glazier, the current chief counsel to House Intellectual Property Subcommittee, has revealed his version of events behind the controversial copyright amendment which could allow record companies to own a sound recording forever, instead of artists being able to reclaim the rights to their work after 35 years. Glazier, who will leave the government and take a six-figure lobbying job with the Recording Industry Association of America in March, also defended his reputation in light of recent media coverage suggesting that his new job indicated that he had been doing the bidding of the recording industry all along.

Glazier said that the amendment, which was added to the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, was not simply slipped into unrelated legislation by a single congressional staffer without representation from artists. Glazier, a copyright attorney who claims to have worked on "every single piece of intellectual property legislation in the Congress" during the last five years, confirmed that there were no formal hearings on the act or the amendment.

Last fall, he said, a 25-person conference consisting of 12-13 members of Congress and their staffers debated a complex problem that arose when trying to extend a cyber-squatting bill to protect all artists' names, not only famous names that are protected as "service marks."

According to Glazier, artists wanted to protect their personal names from being used as domain names by parties who had no right to those names, but the way the bill was originally proposed by artists' legal representatives, it would have prevented a party such as a movie studio from registering an artist's name when it was used in a movie about the person. For example, the bill would have protected the domain name Madonna.com, but it would not have allowed a movie studio to use the name Madonna-movie.com to publicize a film about Madonna.

One legal route around this conundrum was to say that if a work were a "work-for-hire"--meaning that it was created for one party who had all rights to it--the problem over use of the domain name wouldn't apply. Under federal law, movies are considered "works-for-hire," with the movie studio owning the finished product. Many sound recordings, said Glazier, are registered as "works-for-hire," but they are not actually listed that way in the federal statute.

That meant that movie studios could use an artist's name as a domain name with artist consent, but record companies could not. This would have presented a problem for labels if they wanted to publicize an album that had the same name as the artist's name, Glazier explained--they wouldn't have been able to use the "dot-com" name to market the album.

The conference's conclusion, therefore, was to insert an amendment into federal law that would make sound recordings eligible for work-for-hire status. This would allow both record companies and movie studios to register artists' names as domain names when the artist had consented to it.

Glazier said that members of Congress at the conference knew the positions held by the recording industry and the movie industry on the issue. He said that they had been contacted by a small artists' coalition and an artists' law firm in Washington, D.C., which wanted to extended protection to all artists' names.

"No single staffer ever sneaks something into a bill," Glazier said in the defense of the process. "It's talked about and debated [in conference], then the final conference bill is approved."

''No one thought it was a grey area until January,'' Glazier said, when artists' lawyers contacted House Intellectual Property Chair Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) and said that the new amendment would weaken their ability to make the legal argument that artists could get the rights to their recordings back after thirty-five years, if artists had signed contracts on or after 1978.

After that, Coble, other House members and Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters called for hearings on the issue, which will be scheduled as soon as Peters is available to testify.

Though the House Intellectual Property Subcommittee may have found a fix to the domain names problem, the result for artists could be a serious setback. Although the amendment does not automatically take their rights away--they still can bargain for them before they sign a contract--artists and their managers contend that "rights reversion" is difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate with the major labels.

Artists are further crippled in this battle because they do not have one group to represent them in Washington, the way screen actors and studio musicians do, said both Glazier and Ron Stone, a prominent artist manager who is trying to build a coalition among managers who represent Hole, Shawn Colvin, Jackson Browne, Beck and Sheryl Crow.

On March 6, Glazier will become the RIAA's senior vice-president of government relations and its legislative counsel--or, a lobbyist. Following federal law, he will be barred from lobbying the House Judiciary Committee (including the Intellectual Property Subcommittee) for one year.

He contends that he "is not in the hip-pocket of the recording industry" and that he has worked on legislation that is favorable for artists, including the issue of forcing negotiations so that artists can get back royalties from labels when the copyrights on their recordings have been extended.

He added that the job opening at the RIAA did not open until months after the works-for-hire legislation was completed. As a copyright lawyer, he could have found a job working on patents and trademarks for a biotech firm or a major computer company, he said, but wanted a job in the music industry because of the copyright challenges brought about by the digital music age.

Regarding his new six-figure salary, he said that "any job is more lucrative than working for the government."