But Byrd says he doesn't have the money to pursue Sony in court. Teaching music history, cashing the occasional royalty check -- his income doesn't do much more than pay the bills. "The contract I signed was subject to New York state jurisdiction," he says. "I could not even walk in the door of a Manhattan entertainment law firm without a check for $10,000, and I have no proof that the royalties would be enough to pay for that."

He knows that the Dixie Chicks sued Sony last summer (alleging that the label owed them $4 million in unpaid royalties) but, Byrd argues, he and most other so-called middle-class artists don't have the resources or incentive to mount a legal challenge.

"Unless you have the Dixie Chicks kind of potential for vast sums owed, who can afford to sue?" he says. "To say nothing of the cost of an audit, if matters got that far."

The lack of alternatives -- given the futility of his position and Sony's refusal to answer the nine or 10 letters he's sent since 1976 -- has yet to make Byrd particularly angry. He says he is bothered by what he calls the industries' "cynical confidence," the way the Recording Industry Association of America can claim with a straight face that it is fighting the file-trading scourge on behalf of artists. But his overall reaction has largely been one of amazement at "the fact that nobody has ever managed to make these people do business like businesspeople," he says. "If they can screw Peggy Lee or the Dixie Chicks, then they can pretty much get away with anything."

The RIAA and groups like the Future of Music Coalition beg to differ. Both organizations, though usually lined up on opposite sides, contend that artists are stronger and better off now than ever before.

"The industry has changed dramatically since those days [when Byrd was recording]," says John Simson, executive director of SoundExchange, a record industry group that collects webcasting royalties. "Artists have better resources than they ever did in terms of lawyers or other people who understand the business. And there's been a significant change in contracts: They've gotten shorter; the royalty rates have gotten higher, and so have the advances."

Artists have also won more legal protection. Webcasting royalties became mandated by law in 1995 thanks in part to artist support. And in 2000, artists successfully rebelled after the recording industry persuaded legislators to amend the 1976 Copyright Act to allow them to treat recorded music as "work for hire" -- which would have allowed labels to keep some copyrights for up to 95 years instead of giving them back to artists after 35 years.

The Recording Artists' Coalition and the Future of Music Coalition are now confidently pushing for other legislative changes. The RAC is lobbying the California legislature to repeal the Seven Year Statute, which among other things allows labels to sue artists for undelivered albums. The FOMC sent a letter to federal legislators in late March that proposed giving the rights to out-of-print titles back to the original artists.

"Our suggestion to the House and Senate judiciary committees is that there should be a compulsory license where the rights go back to the artist when the record has been out of print for two years," McDonough says. "If the label isn't using it, if it's been out of print, then an artist should be able to have the rights."

Many industry observers believe that the combination of file-sharing and legal changes will be enough to change the industry's business practices. "[The online copyright battle] raises all these issues that artists wouldn't otherwise be thinking about," says Napster's Cohen. "Their filing system is a lot like the way I file things in my house: I put it all in a box and file it in the basement. It's hard to blame them; they own millions of titles. But when people start asking questions about ownership, when people have a reason to say, 'Show me; I want to know who owns it,' suddenly people in the industry have to be able to answer those questions. So the way they behave in the future will be different. They're going to make sure they don't make these mistakes again."

Still, the victories that artists have won come against an industry that is also fighting vigorously for its tried-and-traditional profits. Napster, after attracting 60 million users, is now essentially dead. The file-sharing services that have risen in its wake are also under significant legal pressure.

In the face of growing uncertainty about the future of their business model, labels have grown increasingly conservative and combative, says Simson. After years of working with artists to give them greater control and higher returns on their own work, he says, the recording industry is now trying to retrench and is largely succeeding.

"What's happened is that with the new digital changes, everyone is very concerned about the business model, so it's made everyone very worried about how to make money," he says. "No one has a crystal ball; people are trying their best to figure things out. But progress has been slowed down because of the uncertainty."

Listeners are already suffering, says Dr. Demento, a friend of Byrd's and the host of a well-known comedy and music radio show. "The majors' broad-brush actions have the probably unintended effect of making the music of Joseph Byrd and other relatively obscure creators of out-of-print major-label releases harder to find than it might be otherwise," Demento says. "And that's unfortunate."

The situation could get worse, says Byrd. "The industry has a history of success, with Congress bailing it out when the courts won't," he says. Take the Betamax case, "which they [the entertainment industry] lost, then won with the mind-boggling legislation mandating payment of royalties for sales of blank VCR tapes!"

"I don't think it's cynical to say that the entertainment business is so corrupt that nothing could change how it does business, short of an entire new Bill of Rights for artists," he says. "And for that to happen, there would have to be a public angry enough to demand that Congress stand up to Hollywood. When was the last time that happened?"

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