Eagles drummer and singer Don Henley has a world of trouble on his mind, and he hopes that Congress will lighten his load... by gutting the best part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Defending his copyrights in the digital age is just too hard for Henley and his labels, because it requires constant vigilance of both mainstream user-upload sites like YouTube and dodgier destinations like BitTorrent trackers.

In comments to Rolling Stone last week, Henley admitted that the "the onus of legally pursuing infringement has always been on copyright owners," but went on to argue that the burden of this one-sided monitoring has become too great to handle. Instead, he wants to gut the "safe harbors" in the DMCA that protect sites from material uploaded by users, so long as they take it down in response to a valid DMCA copyright complaint. Those sites should have to do some copyright monitoring of their own.

"Without this change, copyright owners are left with the unjustifiable and oppressive burden of constant policing of the online companies’ sites, which has little real effect on the continual problem of infringement of property, and serves mostly to embitter fans and the users of these sites," said Henley. "The recording industry was bullied by online retailers into removing protective measures, such as DRM, from their sound recordings or else facing the prospect of these retailers refusing to distribute their catalogs. Yet, so far, digital royalties on music have failed to live up to the hype; in fact, removing such protective measures has increased the theft of music and other intellectual property."

Henley made his comments to Rolling Stone's Steve Knopper, whose terrific 2009 book Appetite For Self-Destruction took aim at old-school thinking in the music biz. The book's last chapter, "The Future," is subtitled, "How Can the Record Labels Return to the Boom Times? Hint: Not by Stonewalling New High-tech Models and Locking Up the Content." Knopper refers to Henley's remarks as "surprisingly conservative."

But Henley's not the only one making them; Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, also wants intermediaries to help out his member companies with monitoring and enforcement.

At a speech last week at an Aspen conference, Sherman made the point again. "The DMCA isn't working for content people at all," he said. "You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It's simply not possible. We don't have the ability to search all the places infringing content appears, such as cyberlockers like RapidShare."

Last week, the music industry blog Hypebot described the RIAA as "one of the most loathed, criticized and beleaguered industry trade groups of the last decade," pointing to similar comments from Sherman to VICE magazine.

The trade group famously abandoned most of its litigation against individuals two years ago, shifting instead to a strategy of cajoling ISPs and other intermediaries into working together to address infringement; in its view, the DMCA safe harbors aren't about having sites like YouTube and ISPs like Verizon just sit back and do nothing while music companies waste their cash on repeated takedown notices.