Steven D’Onofrio, Esq. is the President of D’Onofrio & Associates, a Music Licensing, Anti-Piracy and Intellectual Property Consulting Firm, located in Washington, DC. D’Onofrio & Associates consults for intellectual property owners, companies who seek to license music and music publishing rights, as well as Internet, new technology and manufacturing companies who seek to actively deal with protecting intellectual property rights in their everyday business.
D’Onofrio & Associates clients have included Univision Music Group, Fonovisa Records,
J & N Records, Musical Productions, Karen Records, Platano Records, Balboa Records, Iomega, the Software and Information Industry Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, the International Recording Media Association, the International Optical Disc Replicators Association and Fortunecity.com.
Additionally, D’Onofrio and Associates was retained for a two year period by Rowe International (the world’s oldest and largest music jukebox company) to oversee music and music publishing licensing activities for a new subsidiary AMI Entertainment Inc., an Internet connected jukebox company. During that time D’Onofrio & Associates assisted Rowe in opening and staff a New York based music and music publishing licensing office. D’Onofrio & Associates negotiated licenses on behalf of AMI Entertainment with the four major record groups, many independent recording labels (including numerous Latin labels), ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, the Harry Fox Agency, the five major music publishing groups and hundreds of music publishers and recording artist.
Mr. D’Onofrio was retained as the Executive Director of the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a Washington D.C. based non-profit organization devoted solely to combating product counterfeiting. IACC’s over 165 members comprise a cross section of business and industry from autos, apparel, luxury goods and pharmaceuticals, to food, software and entertainment. In this position during 2005-06 Mr. D’Onofrio oversaw the enactment of HR 32, the most important federal anticounterfeiting legislation passed in over 20 years. After the signing ceremony Mr. D’Onofrio was presented with the signing pen by the White House. Prior to the founding of D’Onofrio & Associates, Mr. D'Onofrio served as the Executive Vice President and Director of Anti‑Piracy for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a Washington D.C. based trade association with more than 350 member companies responsible for creating, manufacturing, or distributing ninety percent of all legitimate sound recordings sold in the United States.
During his nearly nineteen years of service at RIAA, Mr. D’Onofrio acted as the recording industry's liaison with federal, state, and local prosecutors and law enforcement offices in anti‑piracy and copyright infringement cases. Mr. D'Onofrio oversaw RIAA’s criminal as well as civil copyright and trademark infringement litigation program against sound recording pirates and counterfeiters. At RIAA he supervised a staff of over 25 executives comprised mainly of investigators and lawyers, in the industry’s battle against physical piracy (CDs, cassettes, etc.) and piracy on the Internet.
Mr. D'Onofrio was responsible for drafting statutes upgrading piracy penalties from misdemeanors to felonies enacted in over thirty states, as well as optical disc identification legislation enacted in the states of California and Florida. He served on the Board of Directors of the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition from 1992 to 1999. He has served as Chairman of the Federal Bar Association Copyright Committee in Washington, D.C., Chairman of the Entertainment Law Circle in New York, was a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Committee on Entertainment and Sports Law as well as the Committee on Copyright and Literary Property, and is a former Trustee of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. He has authored a number of law review and other articles including “In Support of Performance Rights in Sound Recordings” 29 U.C.L.A. Law Review 168, October 1981 for which he also won first prize in the 1980 Nathan Burken Memorial competition (sponsored by ASCAP) at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law and first prize in the 1980 I.H. Prinzmetal Writing Competition (sponsored by the Beverly Hills Bar Association). He has also earned the Wall Street Journal Award for Financial Analysis. Mr. D’Onofrio has lectured throughout the world on Intellectual Property, Music and Music Publishing Licensing, Anti-Piracy and the Music Industry.
Mr. D'Onofrio joined the RIAA after graduating from the U.C.L.A. School of Law in 1980. He earned a Summa Cum Laude B.S. degree in Accounting from Brooklyn College in 1977. He is presently admitted to the New York and Washington, D.C. Bars.
Steven D’Onofrio
D’Onofrio & Associates
5335 Wisconsin Avenue, NW
Suite 950
Washington, DC 20015
PH: 202-686-2872
FX: 202-686-2875
sdonofrio@mindspring.com |
