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RIAA Countersued Under Racketeering Laws
Negadin writes "According to CNET News, a New Jersey woman, one of the hundreds of people accused of copyright infringement by the Recording Industry Association of America, has countersued the big record labels, charging them with extortion and violations of the federal antiracketeering act." The woman's attornies are arguing that "...by suing file-swappers for copyright infringement, and then offering to settle instead of pursuing a case where liability could reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the RIAA is violating the same laws that are more typically applied to gangsters and organized crime."
The Mafia doesn't offer you your day in court if you would rather not pay your protection money.
The RIAA is suing those whom they think are guilty of file sharing. If you are not guilty, you have the absolute right to demand your day in court.
I'm not trying to absolve the RIAA for their heinous practices, but there is nothing illegal about what they are doing.
I have been pwned because my
She'll never win, she won't have the cashflow. Even if she were, by some miricle to 'win', she'd probably be bankrupt. Its about as useless as me suing IBM or Microsoft 'just for fun'
Section 1964 of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act not only provides for civil remedies in cases like this, but also automatically triples the damages and covers court costs and lawyers' fees. Personally, I'd like to see a massive class-action lawsuit against these dirtbags. If it can be won, surely the damages would be enough to curb their malicious behavior.
The RIAA companies probably make a small profit when someone settles with them for a few grand. Lawyers take their cut, but a settlement contract isn't all that expensive or time consuming for the RIAA.
But unless they win HUGE punitive damages (and the loser actually has the money to pay and doesn't declare bankruptcy) they probably lose money when it comes down to a lawsuit. And that takes a long time and involves a lot of up-front legal expenses, for questionable return.
If enough people start counter-suing the RIAA, or at least going to court instead of settling, then the lawsuits will soon become a huge financial burden on the RIAA, even when they win.
Doubltless under what you propose some people may get financially mowed down, but you are leaving out a few factors wich could be very good for the masses:
1) Children age 12, Grandmothers, and People without actual computers being sued in court. Wonderfully bad publicity RIAA
2) Sympathetic Jury Nullification. More wonderfully bad publicity for RIAA
3) A Hung Jury or a simple Not Guilty Verdict. Not only bad for RIAA but it sets a track record. This is one of the things they absolutely DO NOT want.
4) A wealthy defendent who hires an Attorney who can go the distance. This would also be very bad for the RIAA.
So yes, if convicted the RIAA may just take cases to court en masse, but they could also become a classic David vs. Goliath story as well.
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uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
One has to ask two questions. First, if they are willing to settle for such a small amount, why are the fines so high to begin with. Wouldn't it be more efficient to set fines at a appropriate level in the first place? It is very arguable that such high fines were created to allow extortion.
Second, why do they want to settle so badly? It seems like they would want some percentage of the cases to go to court to establish that these people actually violated copyright. As it stands, it would be very reasonable to assert that they are randomly choosing people, and then extorting money from them.
So, with the current tactics, extortion and fear seems to be their game. It is like those old shows where a gang would go into a business and demand protection money. There are legal ways to extort this kind of money, the MPAA and BSA does it. The RIAA does not seem to care about the law.
I really don't understand why the RIAA does not get an independent arbitrator to look at each case, assign a dollar value to the damages, and then send a letter to the alleged violators. Further legal proceedings might occur if the money is not paid, but at least then we would have some confidence that the RIAA is not just harassing innocent people.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
That's a great point. In fact, the quick settlement of the early suits not only emboldened the RIAA, but in the eyes of the general population it probably seemed like a signal that the RIAA was right all along and those nasty song swappers settled quick because they knew they were wrong. Legally a settlement is neutral, but in the eyes of the public, it says guilty for someone. With someone fighting back, suddenly it starts to turn the other way, with lone individuals taking a stand against a big record industry - people love that!
Artists have known for years that they were racketeers.
Proving that in court? That's somewhat more difficult.
>> Since when do judges in the U.S. define the
>> meaning of words in a language?
Judges anywhere can tell lawyers to stop using one term to describe another. If I call a person who was shoplifting a murderer, that can influence the audience, media, and jury, any anyone else involved in a case. I imagine most people see a huge difference between shoplifting and killing, but I'm not alone in seeing a huge difference between piracy and file sharing.
As for open and shut cases, do you really trust an organization that's suing a list of IP addresses because they can't actually go to the trouble of finding actual defendants? Given that a significant percentage of the last batch of addresses aren't even in the United States (the jurisdiction of the court in which the suits were filed), do we trust their investigative prowess so much as to call the cases open and shut? If you're truly concerned about harm to your business, you do the research. If you can't even be bothered to before you trot your ass down to the courtroom, you look a little less than honest in your plaintive wails of "stop the evil file sharers from starving our artists!"
If you happen to know the plaintiff in the RICO countersuit, and you know she is guilty, then my apologies for my tone. Otherwise, I'll keep an open mind as to who the real extortionist is.
And I am sick of people who think that the objection to actions like this by the RIAA are based on legality alone.
People who focus solely on what is and is not legal (like the RIAA and yourself) are missing the point. Sure what the RIAA is doing is legal. But it is also ludicrous.
By (ab)using the legal system in this fashion, the law must be made ever more stringent, new exceptions and modifications must be introduced and so it grows more complex and (from observation) less flexible.
All that this sort of legalism encourages is
a) pressure by special interest groups to change laws to be more favourable or to leave in place laws that have long past their intended purpose to the detriment of the community at large;
b) business models based more on litigation than real value;
c) an increasingly complex legal structure that becomes less and less a codification of the will of the people and more an artifact to protect those who can best manipulate it.
The law is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. It should be (and again I own to idealism) a means of defining the desires of those who elected the people making those laws.
Take a step back. The law under a democratic system should be a tool for everyone and usable by everyone, and examples like this are making it increasingly apparent it is not.
So what is it when someone listens to a song on the radio? Does having a copy of the song so you can listen to it when you want make it theft? What if you record it off the radio?
I'm not saying I think file sharing is not theft, I'm just playing "what if".
I was thinking about "piracy" the other day. If I break into your house and take your TV, it is obviously theft because I have obtained the TV without paying for it and you have suffer the loss of your TV. If, however I make a copy of your copyrighted song, I have still gotten something without paying, but you are not out anything except the money you theoretically would have received for my copy.
When I was a kid, I used to make "unauthorized copies" of lots of programs for my Commodore 64 (I don't do that anymore... I mostly use Free Software or buy the few things I can't get as Open Source). Anyway, the software industry was not really deprived of the money they would have gotten from me purchasing all those games because I never could have afforded them anyway.
To put it another way, if you work minimum wage at Burger King and you download $200,000 worth of music, have you really deprived the music industry of $200,000? No. That's why I find the numbers they spread around about the cost of "piracy" to be misleading.
Well, yeah I am proud of telling the truth even though the judge gives me a hard time about it.
In fact, you're right, I don't want to be there... in the end most people with important stuff to do get excused and the juries end up being made solely of little old ladies and public servants.
And I feel guilty/lucky in some way that I have a legitimate way out.
But if I didn't have the out I wouldn't lie or make up some lame excuse like some do.
It's the judge that gets rid of me every time, and the reason is that they don't like jury nullification, even though it's probably the only reason we're there. I say that since the judge could make a better determination of law than a group of little old ladies and bureaucrats. All I do is answer the lawyers' and judge's questions to the best of my knowledge.
You don't seem to understand the problems involved with your use of jury nullification. What you don't understand is that all government is broken into administrative and political branches.
You are mistaking your role as a juror for an aspect of the political branch when really it's an aspect of the administrative (all judicial rulings below the supreme court are considered administrative).
Now the reason for laws is to define which behaviors society wants it's citizens to follow. (I assume you live in a "democracy") it's basically the guidelines that everyone is expected to follow so we can all get along, these are set at diffrent times but they are not changed often because the government is concerned over the avarice of people. (ex. Everyone wants a new tv so tuesday they decide stealing tv's should be legal).
They don't have you in the jury box in order to decide policy, they have you in the jury box to decide whether the accused is guilty of a crime (law says a, accused did a = guilty a,b!=guilty). Emotions get in the way of factual judgements, whether they impact your understanding of what the law says or bias your opinion of what the accused did.
So why are you there? Well first there are twelve of you, this is to hopefully weed out an individual's emotional issues regarding an issue. Second it is so the government can't cover up crimes. Twelve people will have seen what the government is doing and be able to speak out against it.
In conclusion don't take advantage of your role as an administrator to accomplish political goals. History has shown that a society can rush to judgement (60 war/anti-war, 30's America almost went communist,45 America wanted Japan destroyed, ). Democracy's slow march has prevented as many disasters as it has caused. I am a firm believer that almost all information should be available for free. Know your rights, know how to be politically active, and if you have the majority behind you and the government doesn't listen, well there's always the second ammendment.
Wrong, the sole reason that we need a jury is jury nullification. The ability for common people to say that the representative were wrong, and were not acting in the best interest of the people when they enacted a piece of legisaltion
After all, a judge is much better at deciding maters of fact and law than any juror is.
Here in Fulton County (Georgia, U.S.), the jurors waiting room has brochures everywhere from some legal foundation or another, describing jury nullification. It would be nice if somebody read the damned things.
This is not my sandwich.