The Official Press Release:

April 1, 2006 - Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) chairman Dan Glickman and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) president Cary Sherman today announced the historic merger of the two organizations. The newly-created entity is being called the Music And Film Industry Association of America, Inc. The announcement, made today at the MPAA headquarters in Los Angeles, CA has been a long time coming, according to Glickman.

"The RIAA and the MPAA have been persuing very similar avenues with respect to their fight against piracy of music and movies for many years now," Glickman said. "It just made sense to combine our efforts for maximum effectiveness."

Sherman agreed saying that "there's definitely been some overlap to our methods recently. It took a while for the MPAA to go after its customers as strongly as we have, but they eventually came around."

As a part of the merger, the RIAA has agreed to drop all pretention of actually representing artists and stick to representing the record companies as they have been throughout their fight against online music piracy. The MPAA has always been rather up-front about only representing the interests of its motion picture association members, so no such restructuring or restatement of purpose will be necessary.

The newly formed organization's first priority will be to continue the fight against fair use rights and open technological advances that do not meet with organization approval.

"Consumers should not be able to listen to any music or enjoy any movie anywhere without our approval," said Sherman.

In addition to coordination of anti-piracy efforts, a key benefit of the merger will also be reduced costs.

"We no longer have to have both the movie and music industries buying up senators and congressmen to get restrictive copyright laws passed," Glickman explained. "Now the representatives will be getting one sack of money from one organization. The cost savings to us will be tremendous."

The first such law that the organization will persue will be the passing of the so-called 0WNAGE Act which specifies that copyrights can now only belong to corporations and that all copyrights, including expired ones, will be reinstated and non-expiring.

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