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Nos. 16-56057 & 16-56287

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

Michael Skidmore, as Trustee for the Randy Craig Wolfe Trust,
Plaintiff, Appellant and Appellee,
v.
Led Zeppelin et al.,
Defendants and Appellees, and
Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.,
Defendant, Appellee and Appellant.

On Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Central District of California
The Honorable R. Gary Klausner
No. 15-cv-03462 RGK (AGRx)
Brief Amici Curiae of
the Recording Industry Association of America and
the National Music Publishers Association
in Support of the Petition for Rehearing En Banc

Danielle M. Aguirre
Erich C. Carey
Nat’l Music Publishers’ Ass’n
975 F St. NW #375
Washington, DC 20004
(202) 393-6672
daguirre@nmpa.org
ecarey@nmpa.org
Counsel for NMPA

Eugene Volokh
Mayer Brown LLP
350 S. Grand Ave. #2500
Los Angeles, CA 90071
(310) 206-3926
evolokh@mayerbrown.com
Counsel for RIAA

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RULE 26.1 DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The Recording Industry Association of America and National Music
Publishers Association have no parent corporation, are not publicly
traded, and no publicly held company owns 10% or more of their stock.
Defendants have consented to the filing of this amici brief, but plaintiffs have declined to consent.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Rule 26.1 Disclosure Statement.................................................................. i 
Table of Contents ........................................................................................ii 
Table of Authorities .................................................................................. iii 
Interest of Amici Curiae ............................................................................. 1 
Summary of Argument ............................................................................... 2 
Argument .................................................................................................... 6 
I.  This Court should reconsider the inverse-ratio rule .......................... 6 
II.  This Court should correct the precedent set by the panel
allowing findings of infringement based on use of public
domain elements ................................................................................ 11 
III.  This Court should correct the dangerous precedent that the
panel opinion sets in applying Rule 403 ........................................... 14 
Conclusion ................................................................................................. 18 
Statement of Related Cases ..................................................................... 20 
Certificate of Compliance ......................................................................... 21 
Certificate of Service ................................................................................ 22 

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TABLE OF AUTHORITIES
Page(s)
Cases
Amini Innovation Corp. v. Anthony California, Inc.,
439 F.3d 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2006) ............................................................ 10
Arc Music Corp. v. Lee,
296 F.2d 186 (2d Cir. 1961) ............................................................... 3, 8
Baxter v. MCA, Inc.,
812 F.2d 421 (9th Cir. 1987) .............................................................. 6, 7
Beal v. Paramount Pictures Corp.,
20 F.3d 454 (11th Cir. 1994) .............................................................. 3, 9
Brayton Purcell LLP v. Recordon & Recordon,
606 F.3d 1124 (9th Cir. 2010), abrogated as to other
matters, Axiom Foods, Inc. v. Acerchem Int’l, 874 F.3d
1064 (9th Cir. 2017) ............................................................................. 10
Columbia Pictures Television v. Krypton Broadcasting,
106 F.3d 284 (9th Cir. 1997), rev’d on unrelated grounds
sub nom. Feltner v. Columbia Pictures Television, Inc.,
523 U.S. 340 (1998) .............................................................................. 10
Dream Custom Homes, Inc. v. Modern Day Construction, Inc.,
476 F. App’x 190 (11th Cir. 2012) ......................................................... 9
Edmunds v. Deppisch,
313 F.3d 997 (7th Cir. 2002) ................................................................ 16
Ellis v. Diffie, 177 F.3d 503 (6th Cir.1999)................................................ 9
Ets-Hokin v. Skyy Spirits, Inc.,
323 F.3d 763 (9th Cir. 2003) ................................................................ 13
Janes v. Wal-Mart, Inc.,
279 F.3d 883 (9th Cir. 2002) ................................................................ 14
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L.A. Printex Industries, Inc. v. Aeropostale, Inc.,
676 F. 3d 841 (9th Cir. 2012) ................................................................. 6
Morales v. Artuz,
281 F.3d 55 (2d Cir. 2002) ................................................................... 16
Peters v. West,
692 F.3d 629 (7th Cir. 2012) .............................................................. 3, 8
Rentmeester v. Nike, Inc.,
883 F.3d 1111 (9th Cir. 2018) ........................................................ 13, 14
Satava v. Lowry,
323 F.3d 805 (9th Cir. 2003) .......................................................... 13, 14
Stromback v. New Line Cinema,
384 F.3d 283 (6th Cir. 2004) .................................................................. 9
Swirsky v. Carey,
376 F.3d 841 (9th Cir. 2004) ................................................................ 13
Ty, Inc. v. GMA Accessories, Inc.,
132 F.3d 1167 (7th Cir. 1997) ............................................................ 8, 9
United States v. Edwards,
622 F.3d 1215 (9th Cir. 2010) (Gould, J., joined by Bybee,
Callahan & Bea, JJ., dissenting from denial of en banc) ................... 16
United States v. Layton,
767 F.2d 549 (9th Cir. 1985) ................................................................ 15
United States v. Pickering,
794 F.3d 802 (7th Cir. 2015) ................................................................ 16
Rules
9th Cir. R. 35-1 ........................................................................................... 3
Fed. R. App. P. 35(a) ................................................................................... 3
Fed. R. Evid. 403....................................................................... 5, 14, 17, 18
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Other Authorities
Michael M. O’Hear, Appellate Review of Sentences:
Reconsidering Deference, 51 Wm. & Mary L.Rev. 2123,
2141-49 (2010) ...................................................................................... 16
U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office
Practices § 313.4(C), (2017),
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium.pdf ................... 12

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INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE1
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a nonprofit trade association founded in 1952 to represent the American
recording industry. RIAA’s record company members create, manufacture, or distribute about 85% of all authorized sound recordings
produced and sold in the United States.
Founded in 1917, the National Music Publishers’ Association
(NMPA) is the principal trade association representing the U.S.
music publishing and songwriting industry. Its membership consists of hundreds of music publishers who own or administer the
vast majority of musical compositions licensed for commercial use
in the United States.
Both the RIAA and the NMPA, and their many members, have
a shared interest in maintaining strong but not excessive copyright
protection, and in helping copyright law develop in ways that clarify
the law’s boundaries.

No party or party’s counsel has wholly or partly authored this
brief, or contributed money intended to fund preparing or submitting the brief. No person other than amici has contributed money
intended to fund preparing or submitting the brief.
1

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SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
Composers need copyright protection so they can profit from
their music, and have an incentive to create more music. But they
also need copyright law to let them create new music incorporating
ideas from the vast cultural library of past musical works. Serious
composers hear thousands of compositions throughout their lifetimes, and inevitably create new compositions using underlying
musical structures and fragments that may share common elements with pre-existing works: the same set of possible notes, motifs, chords, musical fragments, and the like.
Copyright law thus needs to carefully calibrate and balance its
rules to prevent both over- and underprotection. Composers’ intellectual property must be protected, but new songs incorporating
new artistic expression influenced by unprotected, pre-existing thematic ideas must also be allowed. The panel opinion badly overprotects, and in doing so is inconsistent with other federal appeals
court decisions that have addressed the same issues. This question,
furthermore, is of exceptional importance to the music publishing
and songwriting industries, as it affects the permissible scope of

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authorship for nearly all newly created works that employ a common set of musical elements. This Court should rehear the case en
banc to address this issue, bring music copyright law back into
proper balance, and better align copyright law in the Ninth Circuit
with the law in other circuits. See Fed. R. App. P. 35(a); 9th Cir. R.
35-1.
1. This Court should reconsider the “inverse ratio” rule, under
which “a lower standard of proof of substantial similarity is required ‘when a high degree of access is shown,’” slip op. at 23. As
the Second, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits have recognized, this
rule “confuses more than it clarifies.” Arc Music Corp. v. Lee, 296
F.2d 186, 187 (2d Cir. 1961); see also Peters v. West, 692 F.3d 629
(7th Cir. 2012); Beal v. Paramount Pictures Corp., 20 F.3d 454, 460
(11th Cir. 1994). It is thus unsuitable in a jury instruction, and the
circuit split on the matter leads to copyright cases being unduly influenced by accidents of venue.
The inverse ratio rule is also both vague and logically unsound.
The “striking similarity” principle correctly recognizes that striking
similarity can raise its own inference of access, and can thus make
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up for limited evidence of access. But the converse is not true: Even
a striking degree of access (and there is no such striking degree
here) does not raise any inference of similarity, and thus cannot
make up for limited evidence of similarity.
2. This Court should also correct the precedent set by the panel
allowing findings of infringement based on the use of uncopyrightable elements. Most compositions share some elements with past
compositions—sequences of three notes, motifs, standard rhythmic
passages, arpeggios, chromatic scales, and the like. Likewise, all
compositions share some elements of “selection and arrangement”
defined in a broad sense. The universe of notes and scales is sharply
limited. Nearly every time a composer chooses to include a sequence
of a few notes, an arpeggio, or a chromatic scale in a composition,
some other composer will have most likely “selected” the same elements at some level of generality.
To keep every work from infringing—and to keep authors from
being able to claim ownership of otherwise unprotected elements—
this Court has stressed that selection and arrangement is infringed

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only when there is virtual identity between two works, not loose
resemblance. The same principle should be recognized for music.
3. This Court should also correct the precedent set by the panel
on Rule 403—a decision that will otherwise be cited far outside
copyright cases, and that will become the go-to precedent for any
litigant in any case, civil or criminal, who wants to argue that a
judge erred in excluding some hypothetically indirectly relevant
piece of evidence.
Judge Klausner made a perfectly sensible evidentiary judgment.
The jury was not supposed to consider the recordings of Taurus, as
performed by Spirit, in evaluating whether Taurus and Stairway to
Heaven were substantially similar. Slip op. at 25, 31, 34. And the
jury was going to get vanishingly little probative information by
watching Page while he listened to Taurus being played. If it is an
abuse of discretion to exclude such tenuously linked evidence here,
litigants could—and doubtless will—make virtually the same argument anywhere.

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ARGUMENT
I.

This Court should reconsider the inverse-ratio rule
To prove the historical fact of copying, in the absence of direct

evidence, a plaintiff can show “(1) that the defendant had access to
the plaintiff’s work and (2) that the two works are substantially
similar.” L.A. Printex Industries, Inc. v. Aeropostale, Inc., 676 F. 3d
841, 846 (9th Cir. 2012). This sort of circumstantial inference simply reflects common experience.
Likewise, the “striking similarity” principle also reflects common
experience: Even without “evidence of access, a ‘striking similarity’
between the works may give rise to a permissible inference of copying.” Baxter v. MCA, Inc., 812 F.2d 421, 423 (9th Cir. 1987). When
two works are very similar indeed, then a reasonable jury can infer
that there must have been some access, since the striking similarity
makes it unlikely that the works were truly independently created.
But no such common experience justifies the view that “a lower
standard of proof of substantial similarity is required ‘when a high

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degree of access is shown,’” slip op. at 23. Even the strongest evidence of access would not make up for an inadequate degree of similarity.
Indeed, while as a practical matter few composers create works
that are strikingly similar to older ones, nearly all composers enjoy
a striking level of access to a vast range of works: They hear them
online, on the radio, at concerts, at home, and elsewhere. Indeed,
they may hear them without ever seeking them out—played as
mood music in elevators, supermarkets, and restaurants, or as incidental music in a film or in a television or radio commercial. Yet
even if hearing the songs this way counts as a “high degree of access” (itself a vague concept that juries would have a difficult time
applying), that should not allow the creators of new works to be
sued under a “lower standard of proof of substantial similarity,” id.
Other circuit courts have recognized this principle. Most prominently, the Second Circuit, which has decided many music composition cases, expressly rejected the inverse ratio rule, calling it a
“superficially attractive” rule that nonetheless “upon examination

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confuses more than it clarifies.” Arc Music, 296 F.2d at 187. “[A]ccess will not supply [the] lack [of similarity], and an undue stress
upon that one feature can only confuse and even conceal this basic
requirement.” Id. at 188. Because of this, the Second Circuit held
that an instruction simply stating, “to find for the plaintiff you must
find that by a fair preponderance of the evidence that the similarities between the compositions and the access inferred are sufficient
to reasonably base a finding of copying,” id. at 187—an instruction
much like the one given here, I ER 30—was superior.
Likewise, the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Easterbrook, held,
[W]e have never endorsed . . . the idea that a “high degree of
access” justifies a “lower standard of proof” for similarity. . . .
This issue [of access] is independent of the question whether
an alleged infringer breached his duty not to copy another’s
work. Once a plaintiff establishes that a defendant could have
copied her work, she must separately prove—regardless of
how good or restricted the opportunity was—that the allegedly infringing work is indeed a copy of her original.
Peters, 692 F.3d at 635. In the process, the court cited Judge Posner’s opinion in Ty, Inc. v. GMA Accessories, Inc., 132 F.3d 1167,
1170 (7th Cir. 1997), which stressed that, though “copying entails
access”—and thus the striking similarity doctrine is sound (“[i]f . . .
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two works are so similar as to make it highly probable that the later
one is a copy of the earlier one, the issue of access need not be addressed separately”)—the reverse is not so: “access does not entail
copying.” Id.
The Eleventh Circuit has taken the same view. See Beal, 20 F.3d
at 460 (“the inverse-ratio rule has never been applied in this Circuit”); Dream Custom Homes, Inc. v. Modern Day Construction, Inc.,
476 F. App’x 190, 192 (11th Cir. 2012) (“the inverse-ratio rule is not
the law of this circuit”). The Sixth Circuit is the only other circuit
that appears to have endorsed the inverse-ratio rule, but it did so
without analysis. Stromback v. New Line Cinema, 384 F.3d 283 (6th
Cir. 2004), stated in dicta that, “In Ellis [v. Diffie, 177 F.3d 503, 507
(6th Cir. 1999)], we observed that in some cases the relationship
between the degree of proof required for similarity and access may
be inversely proportional: where the similarity between the two
works is strong, less compelling proof of access may suffice, and
vice-versa.” But Ellis itself did not hold that strong evidence of access can relax the need to show substantial similarity; it simply said
that “[s]ome case law” favors the striking similarity rule. 177 F.3d
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at 507. To be fair, the Eleventh Circuit’s analysis was as cursory as
the Sixth Circuit’s, but the Second and Seventh Circuit’s analysis
was considerably more detailed. (The Federal Circuit has applied
the inverse ratio rule, Amini Innovation Corp. v. Anthony California, Inc., 439 F.3d 1365, 1368-39 (Fed. Cir. 2006), but only because
it was obligated to follow this Circuit’s decisions, id. at 1368, given
that the case came to the Federal Circuit from the Central District
of California.)
This split among the circuits creates inconsistency and unfairness. “This circuit interprets [the copyright venue] provision to allow venue in any judicial district where, if treated as a separate
state, the defendant would be subject to personal jurisdiction,”
Brayton Purcell LLP v. Recordon & Recordon, 606 F.3d 1124 (9th
Cir. 2010), abrogated as to other matters, Axiom Foods, Inc. v. Acerchem Int’l, 874 F.3d 1064, 1070 (9th Cir. 2017). This includes specific jurisdiction. Columbia Pictures Television v. Krypton Broadcasting, 106 F.3d 284, 289 (9th Cir. 1997), rev’d on unrelated
grounds sub nom. Feltner v. Columbia Pictures Television, Inc., 523
U.S. 340, 342 (1998). Thus, some composers, whether or not they
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reside in the Circuit, may be sued under this Court’s more plaintifffriendly rule; others will be sued under the Second, Seventh, or
Eleventh Circuit’s more defendant-friendly rule; the result is neither fair to litigants, nor conducive to creativity and to the public
interest.
Whether defendant copied plaintiff’s work, as opposed to independently creating a new work, is a factual question. As a factual
matter, a showing that defendant could have copied plaintiff’s work
(access) and that the works are quite similar (substantial similarity) can show copying by a preponderance of the evidence. A further
instruction on what to do when there is a high level of access is not
necessary for the jury to fairly decide the question of copying—and,
as the other circuits recognize, is more distracting than useful.
II. This Court should correct the precedent set by the panel
allowing findings of infringement based on use of public
domain elements
Composers are limited to a finite number of notes. These notes
can only be combined in a limited number of ways. No composer

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may be allowed to claim ownership rights over short common combinations of notes so as to avoid others using the same short phrase
or motif.
This is why Jury Instruction No. 16 was entirely correct in saying that “[c]opyright . . . does not protect . . . common musical elements, such as descending chromatic scales, arpeggios or short sequences of three notes,” I ER 28. Even those “short musical phrases”
that are “novel or distinctive” are not protected by copyright, U.S.
Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices
§ 313.4(C), at 300 (2017), https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/
compendium.pdf, which is even more true of cliché short sequences.
Just as “[m]i do re sol, sol re mi do” is not protected against copying,
id., neither is “do re mi.”
The panel opinion concluded that the instruction nonetheless
erred, on the theory that such common elements could still be protected if “used in combination with other elements in an original
manner,” slip op. at 20, as a form of creative “selection and arrangement,” id. But all compositions will share some elements of “selection and arrangement,” defined in a broad sense, with some earlier
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compositions. To prevent nearly every new composition being at
risk for liability, copyright claims based on “original contributions
to ideas already in the public domain,” Satava v. Lowry, 323 F.3d
805 (9th Cir. 2003), are seen as involving a “thin copyright that protects against only virtually identical copying.” Id. at 812; see also
Ets-Hokin v. Skyy Spirits, Inc., 323 F.3d 763, 766 (9th Cir. 2003)
(“When we apply the limiting doctrines, subtracting the unoriginal
elements, Ets-Hokin is left with . . . a ‘thin’ copyright, which protects against only virtually identical copying.”); Rentmeester v. Nike,
Inc., 883 F.3d 1111, 1128-29 (9th Cir. 2018). This Court has long
recognized this principle in claims involving visual art that allegedly creatively combines public domain elements, as with the sculptures in Satava or the photographs in Ets-Hokin and Rentmeester.
The same should apply to music.
Under this principle, genuinely creative contributions will remain protected. For instance, though do-re-mi is clearly in the public domain, Swirsky v. Carey, for instance, concluded that whether
a particular (and far less common) selection of seven notes was
copyrightable was a question for the jury. 376 F.3d 841, 852 (9th
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Cir. 2004). Yet that just means that copying those seven notes virtually identically might be an infringement. No such virtual identical
copying of an extended musical sequence was shown here.
Judge Klausner’s instructions were thus consistent with this
Court’s approach in cases such as Satava and Rentmeester, and consistent with the need to protect creativity—both by securing creators’ rights to protection for their protectable expression, and securing the right to create using the same unprotectable expression that
others have used before. The panel opinion is not consistent with
this approach, and thus threatens to stifle creativity and spur needless litigation.
III. This Court should correct the dangerous precedent that
the panel opinion sets in applying Rule 403
District courts must routinely decide when to exclude marginally
relevant evidence that is substantially likelier to mislead jurors
than to inform them. That is true in the music industry cases that
especially interest amici, but of course in other cases as well. Limiting instructions, while sometimes unavoidable, are often of limited use and thus may “not adequately protect” a litigant. Janes v.
Wal-Mart, Inc., 279 F.3d 883, 886 (9th Cir. 2002). Because of this,
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“[t]he question of whether the prejudicial and distracting effects of
evidence can be adequately moderated by a cautionary instruction
is committed to the discretion of the district court.” United States v.
Layton, 767 F.2d 549, 556 (9th Cir. 1985).
Here, for instance, the panel agreed with Judge Klausner that
the jury should not be allowed to determine substantial similarity
by comparing Stairway to Heaven to Spirit’s sound recording of
Taurus. Slip op. at 25, 31, 34. Unsurprisingly, Judge Klausner concluded that, because of this, it was better for the jury not to hear
the sound recording at all, especially since hearing the sound recording would do vanishingly little to help the jury determine anything else (such as access). Instead, Page was told to listen to the
recording outside the presence of the jury, and was then questioned
about his past access to the recording in front of the jury. Slip op.
at 33.
The panel rejected this judgment call on the grounds that “allowing the jury to observe Page listening to the recordings would have
enabled them to evaluate his demeanor while listening to the recordings.” Slip op. at 34. But is this really so?
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Imagine Page sitting there, relistening to the recording of Taurus (which he had already recently heard when preparing for the
trial, III ER 502). The jurors are watching his demeanor, an unusual thing for people to do when they are listening to a song together
with someone. What would they be looking for on his face that
would in any way bear on the question whether he had heard the
song nearly 50 years before, in 1967 to 1971? Is there some supposedly tell-tale facial expression that captures the reaction, “Yes, I
had heard that song back then”?
There is an “emerging consensus in the legal and social science
literature that people generally do a poor job in evaluating demeanor evidence.” Michael M. O’Hear, Appellate Review of Sentences: Reconsidering Deference, 51 Wm. & Mary L.Rev. 2123, 214149 (2010), cited favorably in United States v. Edwards, 622 F.3d
1215, 1217 (9th Cir. 2010) (Gould, J., joined by Bybee, Callahan &
Bea, JJ., dissenting from denial of en banc); see also Morales v.
Artuz, 281 F.3d 55, 61 n.3 (2d Cir. 2002); United States v. Pickering,
794 F.3d 802, 805 (7th Cir. 2015); Edmunds v. Deppisch, 313 F.3d
997, 1000 (7th Cir. 2002). But at least when it comes to evaluating
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whether a speaker is lying, laypeople have a good deal of life experience in judging the speaker’s demeanor. Perhaps the witness’s refusal to make eye contact with the questioner might offer some
clues, or the witness’s seeming nervousness; or so at least our legal
system concludes. Certainly the witness’s reactions when being
cross-examined are often seen as an important indicator of whether
the witness is telling the truth.
But most jurors have no such life experience in evaluating the
demeanor of musicians who are listening to music. Whether Page
is paying rapt attention, or looking bored, or shaking his head, or
tapping his fingers as he is relistening to Taurus in a 2010s courtroom has no bearing—except as a basis for the sheerest of conjecture—on the legally relevant question, which is whether he first
heard the song before or after 1971.
If a trial judge’s Rule 403 balancing is viewed as mistaken because of such a hypothetical, even fanciful, chain of inference, then
the same argument could be made as to virtually any such decision
in virtually any such case. And if it could be made, it will be made,

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as zealous advocates come up with comparably tenuous theories explaining why the evidence in their case was wrongly excluded. This
Court should step in to correct this dangerous precedent.
CONCLUSION
This case strikes at the heart of the creative process, and thus at
the core of the copyright law’s attempts to protect the creative
rights both of past authors and of present ones. Authors, including
composers, must and should use unprotectable elements created by
those creators coming before them. The panel decision, however,
makes that especially perilous.
The panel decision perpetuates one mistaken doctrine—the inverse ratio rule—that unduly jeopardizes the rights of creators. It
creates a new mistaken precedent, by allowing liability for the use
of basic musical elements that have long been seen as unprotectable.
And it causes damage far beyond copyright law, by rejecting a district judge’s sound exercise of his discretion under Rule 403, and
thus setting an erroneous precedent that will be cited in myriad
future appeals. This Court should grant rehearing en banc to reconsider these decisions.

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Respectfully Submitted,
s/ Eugene Volokh
Attorney for Amicus Curiae RIAA
s/ Erich C. Carey
Attorney for Amicus Curiae NMPA

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STATEMENT OF RELATED CASES
There are no related cases covered by 9th Cir. R. 28-2.6.

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CERTIFICATE OF COMPLIANCE
This brief complies with the type-volume limitation of Fed. R.
App. P. 32(a)(7)(B) because this brief contains 3,403 words, excluding the parts of the brief exempted by Fed. R. App. P. 32(a)(7)(B)(iii).
This brief complies with the typeface requirements of Fed. R.
App. P. 32(a)(5) and the type style requirements of Fed. R. App. P.
32(a)(6) because this brief has been prepared in a proportionally
spaced typeface using Word 2016 in 14-point Century Schoolbook.
Dated: November 5, 2018
s/ Eugene Volokh
Attorney for Amicus Curiae RIAA

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CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE
I hereby certify that I electronically filed the foregoing Brief
Amici Curiae with the Clerk of the Court for the United States
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by using the appellate
CM/ECF system on November 5, 2018.
All participants in the case are registered CM/ECF users, and
will be served by the appellate CM/ECF system.
Dated: November 5, 2018
s/ Eugene Volokh
Attorney for Amicus Curiae RIAA

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