Man to claim RIAA collusion at DMCA hearings

On May 14, 2003, at the DMCA hearings at UCLA Law School in Los, Angeles, California, I am scheduled to speak on the current exemption enjoyed by libraries and educational institutions to bypass copy protection of malfunctioning machines.

One facet which must be addressed are the changes in the marketplace which have occurred during the past three years.

I will use this opportunity to offer to the United States Copyright Office the entire contents of the www.riaa.org and www.azoz.com websites as evidence that the RIAA and the five major labels have pooled their copyrights in a collusion to exempt the product of the tens of thousands of independent artists in the United States (not to mention the rest of the world) from the marketplace by casting dispersions on the very morality of the act of file sharing, manipulating the market to create a pay-per-play society in which they possess the only recognized "legal" product, and lying to the government in order to promote the false claim of "piracy" in the form of unauthorized downloads as the cause of the industry decline.

There is no empirical data to support this latter claim.

My argument will basically be the same counter-claim David Boies used in the Napster case, with the 9th District Court's analysis of why Boies' argument was not relevant to the Napster case. The difference is simple. Napster was infringing on copyrights. We (the independents) had an opportunity to negotiate separately. Therefore, even though the court recognized a monopoly did, in fact, exist, their collusion was justified in light of the infringing activity.

This time the collusion is designed to exempt the independents from the market place. Because for the first time in history, we don't need them.

I don't need a lawyer. Much as Don Henley did with the payola accusation, I will make my charges directly to the United States government. They cannot be ignored.

Under the antitrust laws, the burden of proof is on the accused.

George Ziemann
MacWizards Music
www.azoz.com