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RIAA Takes the Fight to the Streets
Lapzilla writes "In an article from LA Weekly, it would appear the RIAA has taken their fight to the streets. Wearing jackets with "RIAA" emblazoned upon them, they have taken to busting street vendors in an FBI fashion for selling bootleg CDs and DVDs."
There is a word for one who takes the law into his/her own hands: vigilante.
Esoteric reference.
Except under some VERY limited circumstances, private citizens are not allowed to enforce the law, and even then they are taking a risk of being charged themselves.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
From Crimedoctor:
You must approach the shoplifter outside of the store. Although not technically necessary, following this step eliminates all possibility that the shoplifter still intends to pay for the stolen product. A few courts have held that detaining someone for shoplifting inside a retail store does not establish the criminal intent of theft. However, in several states shoplifters can be detained once they have concealed the merchandise. When approaching a shoplifter outside of the store always have a least one trained employee as a witness. There is safety in numbers and most shoplifters will cooperate if they believe fighting or running is futile. When you approach a shoplifter outside it is important to identify yourself clearly and your authority for stopping them. Plain-clothes loss prevention agents carry badges or official looking ID cards so the shoplifter has no doubt who they are. Most shoplifter apprehensions should be accomplished with no force or if necessary, minimal force like touching or guiding. Professional loss prevention agents sometimes will use handcuffs to take someone into custody, if they are first trained how and when to legally apply them properly.
In almost every jurisdiction if you follow these six steps, you should have no problem with proving criminal intent to shoplift and be able to establish probable cause to detain a shoplifter.
I guess the question is exactly how can a store detain you, especially if the items shoplifted are at a value low enough for the crime to be a misdemeanor?
That is where Security Expert comes into play:
In almost all jurisdictions in the United States, merchants are legally empowered to detain shoplifting suspects for investigation and possible arrest and prosecution in the criminal justice system. This power is called "merchant's privilege."
There are more details about Merchant's privilege in the aformentioned link.
You are allowed to protect your own property with reasonable force. If someone tries to steal your car, you can perfectly legal pull him out of the car and kick him a few times to keep him down. Shooting the idiot is most obviously going too far.
Here's a case local to me dealing with just this issue: link
Citizen's arrest powers only apply to violent acts, and usually only to felonies. Sorry, but you can't slap handcuffs on the guy in the next cube because he has a few MP3's.
[constitution.org]
What's that smell? Ah, that's my karma burning...
"The process of confiscating bootleg CDs from street vendors is exactly what the RIAA should be doing," said Jason Schultz, a staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
No. Confiscation should be left up to the courts. The RIAA should, if it feels it has a valid complaint, report it to the authorities. Confiscation, by a corporation or private individual, should never be allowed. At the point they are doing this, nothing has been proven in a court of law. Due process, people.
In Texas it is legal to use lethal force to protect property. If someone trespassing on private property they can be shot. So if at 3 in the morning I hear some crackhead breaking in my house I can use my 12 Gauge.
Their attire is completly irrelevant to this point.
Not if it would lead a reasonable person to believe that they are a police officer.
If they represented themselves as police officers then they are guilty of a criminal offense,
Indeed.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Except what they're doing isn't a citizen's (note the apostrophe) arrest. In almost every state statute covering citizen's arrests, one of the requirements is that you turn over the arrested person to law enforcement for prosecution. The concept isn't that any joe citizen on the street can start executing his own style of vigilante justice, but rather that in cases where a police officer is not present a private citizen may act to prevent the carrying out of a crime - but as soon as is feasible the arrestee should be turned over to actual law enforcement.
What the RIAA is doing in this case is harassing people who happen to be breaking the law, and I think the way in which they are choosing to pursue is of dubious legality. I wouldn't be surprised if they find themselves on the other end of a lawsuit in the near future over this.
fuck you.
...and it is legal.
/don't shoot the messenger
I see many on here saying it is illegal for them to take the property of someone else. Not necessarily. My brother works with a very popular rock band. One of the other guys with them obtains -- I believe from a local judge in the city of the venue they are playing -- a legal order that allows the band to confiscate any unlicensed merchandise with the band's name or logo on it, as well as bootlegged CD's.
My guess is the RIAA street team has a similar document or legal backing to do the same thing.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I'm only familiar with the term "orthogonal" in a math context. What do you mean by the sentence:
"If they represented themselves as police officers then they are guilty of a criminal offense, which is completely orthogonal to the confiscation."
It's the same sense of the word. Consider representing your self as a police officer as a vector (call it RPO) of social/ethical concerns, and likewise confiscation (call it CONF). He's saying that RPO dot CONF equals zero; in other words, that issues raised by one are not raised by the other or--to the extent that they are--the ways in which they are raised cancel out overall.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. A less formal way of looking at it: if you were to change the extent to which they were guilty of either PRO or CONF, the change would have no effect on the magnitude of their guilt with regard to the other offense.