RIAA Hires Artists, Then Sends In the SWAT team

cancan writes "The NY times is carrying an article about how the RIAA is hiring hip hop artists to make mix tapes, and then helping the police raid their studios. In the case of DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon, they were raided by SWAT teams with their guns drawn. The local police chief said later that they were 'prepared for the worst.' Men in RIAA jackets helped cart away 'evidence'. Just the same, 'Record labels regularly hire mixtape D.J.'s to produce CDs featuring a specific artist. In many cases, these arrangements are conducted with a wink and a nod rather than with a contract; the label doesn't officially grant the D.J. the right to distribute the artist's songs or formally allow the artist to record work outside of his contract.' " This is more of the shenanigans that we've previously discussed on the site.

Comments

Criminal Liability?

[Garrett Fox]

If that's so, could the RIAA be hauled into criminal court for conspiracy to commit piracy?

There's a certain point where...

[DrRevotron]

This kind of action just becomes unacceptable.

At one point, the RIAA could have been negotiated with. That point has passed us by very, very fast. If it weren't illegal, I'm positive that most people would have taken up arms months ago and "settled" all the MAFIAA's court cases themselves.

The RIAA homepage needs to be slashdotted, repeatedly, and with no end in sight. Just like with the P2P networks, they'll feel the wrath of nerds with lots of bandwidth.

Re:Zappa

[Neuropol]

My initial impression: Entrapment And since when does the RIAA get to act like feds and be part of a raid? The boundaries of law enforcement between the record industry seem to be heavily blurred if this is happening. Sounds like the RIAA wants to do a little too much CSI role playing in these setups. I'm imagining little numbered paper tents on tape reels, ziplock bags with drink straws and beer caps, carbon dust on mixing console faders, etc. This is a ridiculous waste of time and money. Who pays for this? Is this tax payer money being thrown at the desire to feel badass in a dark blue jacket with yellow letters on the back? All for the sake of abolishing the spread of entertainment. so. over. it. GET A NEW HOBBY.

Re:Misleading

[1point618]

I completely agree. However, the RIAA did do something scummy: they're leaving BestBuy and other distributors be, free to continue selling the same CD's. Also, previously the DJ's felt that there was sort of a "you help us, we won't go after you" feeling towards the whole deal, that is no longer present.

Off topic: my favorite part of the article was when one of the rappers interviewed said he didn't support mixtapes, by which he meant he bought and listened to them (of course) but didn't like it when his material was used. It seems to me that it's greed and hypocrisy like this that permeates the RIAA and major labels. I guess that's normal for capitalism, and why I'm all for creating laws that protect citizens from the corporations as much as we have them to protect us from the government.

"Overkill" by Radley Balko

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the past several years, Radley Balko (formerly with the Cato Institute, now an editor at Reason), has documented the increasing frivolous mis-use of SWAT teams.

Last year, he published his findings in a book called "Overkill" (page here, direct link to free copy in 2 MB PDF here).

Also, check out his blog at TheAgitator.com , and his posts at Reason's blog.

Americans have long maintained that a man's home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

Re:Hollywood Accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush had an opportunity to go after the entertainment industry after the collapse of the crooked accounting which helped drive the economic boom of the 1990s (Enron, WorldCom, etc). Especially since it is an industry that hates Republicans anyway -- so he had nothing to lose and everything to gain. But he blew it. No surprise there.

The Democrats who are now in charge of Congress won't dare offend their corporate donors/propaganda ministers.

http://www.instapundit.com/oldarchives/2001_08_12_ instapundit_archive.html

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY: The Administration's recent moves to prosecute record labels for antitrust violation and to prosecute some media tycoons for illegal trips to Cuba are likely to be just the beginning. Look at it from the Bush Administration's point of view: (1) record companies and movies studios are almost certainly guilty of price fixing and other antitrust violations; (2) it's well established that the both industries are marketing allegedly "mature" items to underage teens; (3) both industries engage in byzantine accounting that makes them highly likely to be violating some tax law or other; (4) they're also screwing their artists (an entertainment lawyer I know says that when he exercises the audit clause he insists on in contracts, he always finds a lot of money they "forgot" to pay the artist, and never any mistakes in the artist's favor); and, most importantly (5) these are industries that hate Republicans, bad-mouth Bush, and give a lot of money to Democrats. Plus, if Bush is subtle enough he can do this in a way that drives a wedge between studios and labels on the one hand, and artists on the other, thus dividing a crucial Democratic constituency. Finally, young people don't like the labels and studios anymore because of their thuggish behavior with regard to Napster, DVDs, etc., and older voters don't like them because of their products -- and both groups are important for Bush. True, these companies own a lot of major news media organizations -- but the major media already don't like Bush, so he has little to lose there.

Posted 8/17/2001 01:38:25 PM by Glenn Reynolds

http://www.instapundit.com/oldarchives/2001_09_02_ instapundit_archive.html

MORE BAD NEWS FOR THE RECORD INDUSTRY: The record companies have been installing copy-protection schemes on CDs that keep them from playing at all on computer CD drives, don't let them be ripped into MP3 format, etc. Now a consumer has filed a lawsuit (click here to see the complaint) against them. This isn't some fancy-pants claim based on the DMCA, where the entertainment industry has managed to rig the ground rules in its favor, but a straightforward suit for fraud & deceptive advertising, as well as invasion of privacy (the proprietary format that you can copy these to returns identifiable consumer information to the company). Apparently the record companies -- correctly assuming that no one in his/her right mind would buy this stuff if it were clear what was going on -- didn't include any warning on the packaging.

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING of what is likely to be a long and ugly period of litigation for the entertainment industries. Expect more lawsuits over price-fixing, payola-based racketeering suits, consumer fraud suits, etc. There are also likely to be federal investigations of the sort music industry insiders have been demanding for a while, now that the Clinton administration isn't protecting the industry anymore. (Expect the Bush Justice Department to show far less consideration to these big Democratic donors than Clinton's did).

THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY IS MASSIVELY UNPOPULAR with nearly everyone now. Older people and conservatives think it produces immoral crap. Younger people -- be

Re:Are you kidding? Here's some realistic methods.

[dasimms]

And the number one way to stop the RIAA is to stop buying music. Put your money where your mouth is and enjoy the music you already have or enjoy the music you or your friends make. If enough of us stop giving the RIAA our money they'll disappear. Of course, breaking out the weapons cache sounds exciting too but I'd rather fight over something more (much more) important.

Re:Who would have thought?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Mind you, the raid itself seemed a bit extreme.
They found none of the stuff that made them think they should go in armed. Still, I don't know what percentage of raids of this type do turn up arms/drugs, or how many they have to do, the gun toting could simply be policy.

I hate to use a phrase from the Iraq War, but it fits. It's "shock and awe" tacticts. Despite what Slashdotters want to believe, the DJs are bootleggers. This article stated that it found 25,000 CDs. A previous article I believe put that number at 75,000. Folks, this is an organized bootleg operation that got shut down. Going in armed is typical of this type of operation to shut down bootleggers. They do it to try to send a message of fear to other people who might be involved in the same thing.

Re:Zappa

[NickFortune]

Speed cameras aren't just put up as a revenue earner, or to piss you off

I'm guessing you don't drive in the UK. Some of them are quite definitely put up for no reason other than as revenue earners. I can think of one road near where I live that's 40mph one side of a roundabout, and then 30mph on the other. No good reason for it. It's a nice wide road on both sides, no new hazards to justify the change in speed limit.

But they have speed cams, and that earns revenue. You'd almost think they were deliberately trying to catch motorists out, wouldn't you?

But the thing that really gripes me about that particular case is that it introduces an unnecessary hazard. If a motorist is caught out by the speed change, and he's expecting the car in front to accelerate to 40 then he could go right into the back of the guy in front. And while it's still his responsibility to keep his eyes open, I'd argue that the highest aim of good road design is road safety, and that doesn't seem to be the case in this instance.

That's not to support the use of explosives, just so we're clear. But to say that there is no financial motivation behind some speed camera placements doesn't tally with my experience at all.

Brilliant decision. Just brilliant.

[Phanatic1a]

The RIAA does this thing enough times, they're going to kill someone.

The routine use of paramilitary police raids for nonviolent offenders gets people killed on a routine basis. Three cops are now on trial for murder in Atlanta because they raided a house, killed an innocent old lady, and then lied after the fact to establish a bogus justification for the warrant. Police in Virginia raided a dentist's house for records related to illegal gambling, and one of the cops violated the two first laws of firearms safety and shot him dead when he tripped with his fucking finger on the trigger.

The steady flow of federal dollars for "homeland security" has exacerbated a problem which was started by the War on Some Drugs: incompetent, ill-trained paramilitary police forces who are both encouraged to "prepare for the worst" and given access to powerful weaponry. The result is a bunch of corpses. Corpses of innocent people, non-violent offenders, and even cops. The nature of unannounced no-known raids turns non-violent, low-stress situations into violent and stressful ones, with predictable results. In many of these cases (like the aforementioned dentist), regular cops showing up, knocking on the door, and serving a warrant, would be sufficient to perform the desired search. But when a dozen cops burst through the door with guns drawn, people get killed.

The RIAA instigates enough of these raids, the RIAA are going to kill someone. For copyright violation. It's just a matter of time.

Why is this marked as 'Troll'

[shis-ka-bob]

This is truly what Fascism is, the binding together of corporate and governmental power. The corporations prosper and the power of their capital is fused with the power of the state to govern. Viewing fascism as corporations serving the government is only half of the story, the other half is that that power of the state is made available to corporations. This is almost a textbook example of the latter.

Re:Zappa

[Saint Fnordius]

The post you responded to was inaccurate in that it was too generalising. Over here in Germany, for example, the police often put up blatant traffic cameras on notorious stretches, those which have suffered a high amount of accidents. After a week or two the revenues earned goes down dramatically, but so does the amount of accidents. Since the lost revenue is less then the increased expense of responding to an accident (not to mention the intangible price of a human life!), the planners leave that road on heavy rotation. I suspect that sometimes the cameras are placed but not "armed", simply to act as a deterrent.

But we've drifted far, far from the topic of an nongovernment cartel abusing police resources. A "speeding trap" is not all that analogue to the heavy-handed scare tactics the RIAA is now engaging in, destroying whatever sympathy any artist might have felt for them before.

Re:Zappa

[Achromatic1978]

Definitely. My favorite is when they try to stop radio stations broadcasting locations. Unfortunately, they had no real answer to the "But if we tell people where they are, they'll slow down, that's what you want, right? Not the fine? Right?" paradox.

Mind you, they can be sneaky too. In Victoria, though completely forbidden by the act, I've seen cars on the side of the road, hazard lights blinking, hood up, and the camera gear perched atop the engine, so it's completely hidden - usually there's a telltale flash lamp on the ground just in front of the car.

Re:I'm SO sick of hearing....

[Tmack]

... The sneaky part is that the RIAA is hiring these guys to break the law. Yes, that's sneaky, but it's entirely legal.

...

Not quite legal, its called "Solicitation". You are asking someone to do something illegal. Same as if they posed as Johns asking under-cover officers for "services". They would be arrested for soliciting the officer for those services. The officer gets away un-charged, as they have a clear conscience in the eyes of the law: they have no intent to actually perform the illegal activity as they are officers of the law itself. In this case, the RIAA is more like someone acting like an undercover cop, soliciting the potential prostitutes, getting the actual services performed, then calling the cops on the prostitute, neglecting the fact that they already participated in the illegal act themselves.

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