Six members of Congress and the U.S. Register of Copyrights are calling for hearings to illuminate a controversial new amendment to the 1976 Copyright Act which could prevent recording artists from ever regaining the rights to their work from record companies.

But it could be as long as three months before hearings are scheduled, and artists and their managers lack a single organization to represent them.

The amendment in question makes sound recordings eligible for "work for hire" status, a category of intellectual property usually reserved for large collaborative efforts, such as movies, in which many individuals contribute to the finished product. Contributors to "works for hire" are paid for their contributions and are not entitled to sell or distribute the work.

Artists and their managers fear that if sound recordings can be legally considered "works for hire," artists who signed recording contracts after 1978 will not be able regain their rights after the 35-year waiting period currently specified in the law.

At the request of the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group which represents major record companies, the eligibility clause was added as a "technical amendment" to the unrelated Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act. The act was part of a much larger appropriations bill and was signed into law on Nov. 29, 1999. The Senate did not hold hearings on the issue, and the RIAA did not consult artists, managers, or session and performing musicians.

House Judiciary Committee members Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.), ranking Democratic member John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), Rep. Mary Bono (R-Calif.), Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) all favor hearings on the issue. (All but Frank are members of the 14-person House Intellectual Property Subcommittee, which is chaired by Coble). U.S. Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters, the nation's senior copyright official, also supports hearings, according to a recent issue of Billboard.

Coble said that the next step would be to invite "four or five" interested parties on both sides of the issue and possibly a neutral party. It could be one to three months before hearings are scheduled, he said. He added that he had other issues and bills that he considered ''as pressing'' as this one.

Meanwhile, artists and managers are considering who their most informed representatives might be and what new steps they may take. Manager Ron Stone, whose Los Angeles firm Gold Mountain represents Los Lobos, Bonnie Raitt and other high-profile artists, said he favored Don Henley, calling him "the most articulate and politically aware." Henley recently told Billboard that artists should contact their managers and ask them to research the issue to advance their cause.

Another option on the table for artists is the creation of a cohesive organization. While some musicians belong to the American Federation of Musicians, it mainly represents orchestral, theater and session musicians and not recording artists as whole. There are also a host of other musician groups, but none have the lobbying power nor the instant name recognition necessary to wage a battle in Washington.

Stone said that for the last two years he had been trying to organize 20-50 managers into a group called the Artists Coalition, initially to voice concerns over Internet piracy. The group failed to take shape, however, because some important managers made Internet business deals that ran counter to the interests of the group.

A third possibility for artist representation is a group that comes from an unlikely quarter but is one of the few recognized by Congress: the National Association for Recording Arts and Sciences, best known for presenting the Grammys. Stone said that on Tuesday (1/25) he had contacted NARAS president/CEO Michael Greene, who was sympathetic to the artists' position, according to Stone.

"I want him [Greene] to go to Washington and articulate the artists' point-of-view," Stone said.

In the long term, Stone wants record companies to be much more willing to make contractual provisions that specify when artists can regain the rights to their recordings, rather than relying on the "termination clause" in the Copyright Act, which will not be acted upon or tested in court until 2013, when the first artists who signed contracts in 1978 can try to get their rights back.

The picture is not completely bleak, Stone said, because pro-artist advances have been made in the related area of music publishing negotiations. While the major record companies reportedly refuse to sign a new artist to a contract that includes a "rights reversion" clause, the music publishing industry is no longer so stalwart.

"In the past fifteen, twenty years, artists have been able to change that dynamic [with music publishing companies] and the word 'reversion' has come into the conversation," Stone said. "So now, the artist can negotiate, with some degree of success, a five-year, seven-year, [or] ten-year reversion, at the end of which the copyrights return to the writer. That's exactly what we want to have happen at the record company level."