Don Henley
Eagles Co-Founder
Eagles co-founder and lifelong artists’-rights crusader — from the Napster wars to Senate copyright testimony — who calls the AI era an unregulated “Wild West” where corporations “don’t do the right thing.”
In his words
It’s the Wild West. There’s no regulation. In my lifetime, I’ve seen what corporations do when they’re not regulated: They don’t do the right thing.
I think the internet, social media, and AI have proven him right.
Biography
Don Henley (born 1947 in Gilmer, Texas) co-founded the Eagles in 1971, drumming and singing lead on “Hotel California,” “Desperado” and “The Long Run” before a solo career that produced “The Boys of Summer” and “The End of the Innocence.” The Eagles’ first greatest-hits collection is among the best-selling albums in American history, and the band still fills arenas — including a landmark residency at the Las Vegas Sphere.
Three decades of fighting the machines
Henley has spent as much energy on artists’ rights as on music. In 2000 he co-founded the Recording Artists’ Coalition with Sheryl Crow to fight label and platform practices in the Napster era, and in the 2010s he became one of the industry’s sharpest critics of Google and YouTube, telling Digital Music News in 2015 that the internet was “slowly but surely killing the idea of copyright.” In June 2020 he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, calling the DMCA’s takedown system “a relic of a MySpace era in a TikTok world” and urging Congress to adopt a “notice-and-stay-down” standard that would stop infringing copies from endlessly reappearing.
“AI have proven him right”
His AI verdict arrived through Henry David Thoreau. Promoting the 2026 PBS documentary on Thoreau that he executive-produced — Henley founded the Walden Woods Project in 1990 to save the writer’s woods from developers — he told Boston.com that Thoreau’s warning that improvements in communication technology do not necessarily improve communication had been vindicated: “I think the internet, social media, and AI have proven him right.” He described an “attention span crisis” in which “our attention has become a commodified resource that is extracted from us,” and pointed to the “tremendous amounts of water” consumed by AI data centers.
It’s the Wild West. There’s no regulation. In my lifetime, I’ve seen what corporations do when they’re not regulated: They don’t do the right thing.
Henley’s AI critique is of a piece with everything he has said about technology and music since the file-sharing wars: the problem, in his telling, is never the invention itself but the unaccountable corporations deploying it against creators before the law catches up.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/don-henley