October 16, 1996
Contact: Guy Lamolinara, Public Affairs Office (202) 707 9217
Robert Fistick, National Library Service for the Blind
and Physically Handicapped (202) 707 9279
Seized Recording Equipment Donated to Library Service for the Blind
An effort of the National Library Service for the Blind and
Physically Handicapped and the U.S. Copyright Office, both part
of the Library of Congress, will result in high-speed duplicating
equipment being donated to the library program in Georgia that
serves blind and physically handicapped patrons.
Georgia's users of audio books are the beneficiaries of a
raid on counterfeit music cassette pirates in Atlanta. The raid
was part of a national operation orchestrated by the Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA) and law enforcement
agencies against pirates who had been breaking copyright laws to
duplicate music tapes, which sell for between $2 and $5 on the
illegal marketplace.
RIAA will donate five units of seized high speed tape
duplicating equipment to the Georgia Library for the Blind and
Physically Handicapped on Wednesday, Oct. 16, at 3:30 p.m. in the
Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education's State Board
Room, 1800 Century Place, Atlanta.
The Georgia library will use the machines to reproduce
recorded materials for the state's blind and handicapped readers
of talking books. Each machine is capable of making 11 copies of
both sides of a 60 minute tape and rewinding them in less than
two minutes. The equipment, estimated to be worth $29,000, was
seized in a raid by the Cobb County Sheriff's Department in
October 1992 in Roswell, from a tape-counterfeiting factory that
had the capacity to produce 1.8 million tapes a year, with an
estimated loss of $18 million to the recording industry.
Until recently, seized supplies and equipment would have
been destroyed. To prevent duplicating equipment from falling
back into the hands of tape pirates, authorities smashed the
$12,000 tape duplicators instead of selling them at auction, as
is the case for other seized property.
RIAA explained this routine destruction in September 1995 in
a briefing to the Library of Congress Copyright Office, which
issues copyrights to the recording industry. Attending the
briefing was Mary Levering, associate register for national
copyright programs and a former chief of the Network Division of
the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically
Handicapped. "I know a community that could use this equipment,"
she told RIAA officials. Later, Steven D'Onofrio, RIAA executive
vice president and director of anti-piracy, and Frank Kurt Cylke,
Director of the Library of Congress program, reached an
agreement, later formalized into a memorandum of understanding,
for the nation's libraries for the blind to receive the
confiscated duplicating equipment.
"RIAA is working to give the seized tape duplicating
machines to talking book libraries across the country," said
Charles Lawhorn, senior regional anti-piracy counsel for RIAA in
Los Angeles, site of the first such donation earlier this year.
As a result, at least 18 pieces of industrial high speed
tapeduplicating equipment have been or will be soon turned over
to regional libraries in California, Georgia and Texas. The total
estimated value of this equipment is $108,000.
RIAA is a private, not for profit corporation whose member
companies represent 90 percent of all legitimate recorded music
sold in the United States. RIAA has 12 investigators and five
attorneys nationwide in its anti-piracy unit. Since 1991, RIAA's
efforts have resulted in 1,552 arrests and indictments and 799
guilty pleas and convictions of manufacturers and distributors of
pirated sound recordings.
The Library of Congress talking book program is a free
national library program of braille and recorded books and
magazines administered by NLS. Full length books and magazines
are produced in braille and on recorded cassette. These reading
materials are distributed to a cooperating national network of
143 regional and subregional (local) libraries, where they are
circulated to eligible borrowers in a readership of 776,000.
More than 22 million recorded and braille books are
circulated annually to these eligible borrowers. Reading
materials and playback machines are sent to borrowers and
returned to libraries by postage free mail. Established by an act
of Congress in 1932 to serve blind adults, the program was
expanded three times: in 1952 to include children, in 1962 to
provide music materials and in 1966 to include individuals with
other physical disabilities that prevent the reading of standard
print. In 1996, the U.S. Copyright Law was modified to grant
nonprofit agencies automatic permission to reproduce nondramatic
literary works in special formats.
Contacts in Atlanta: Helen Mathis, Georgia Department of
Technical and Adult Education, (404) 679-1612; Linda Koldenhoven,
Georgia Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, (404)
756 4619; Alexandra Walsh, RIAA Media Relations Director, (202)
775 0101
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PR 96-142
10/11/96
ISSN 0731-3527