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How the RIAA has Dodged RICO Charges
Gerardo writes "Wondering why the RIAA hasn't been hit with racketeering charges over its shady legal fight against file-sharing? Ars Technica looks at why the RIAA has been able to dodge RICO charges. '"Right off the bat there are some problems with the predicate claims for RICO," explained IP attorney Rich Vazquez. "You have to have a pattern of racketeering activity: either criminal acts where there is a one-year jail penalty, or mail or wire fraud." Any RICO action brought against the RIAA would have to focus on the wire fraud component, likely accusing the record labels of poking around someone's PC without permission.' That's going to be a difficult argument to make, given that Kazaa's default settings give users no reasonable expectation of privacy."
According to Wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_ and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act ), which, while we all know is as reliable as Miss Cleo makes for a nice copy/paste...
Under RICO, a person or group who commits any two of 35 crimes--27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes--within a 10-year period and, in the opinion of the United States Attorney bringing the case, has committed those crimes with similar purpose or results can be charged with racketeering.
The RIAA has yet to actually get hit with their OWN investigation, let alone multiple ones. Since the RIAA hasn't been brought up on charges yet, let alone be convicted, they can't meet those prereqs for RICO.
This still leaves the door open in the future (given the RIAA's current track record), but right now, all that can be done is to keep winning the frivolous suits they bring up against other people and not settling early.
RICO looks like a three strikes law, and the RIAA doesn't have one strike against them yet.
IAAL, and I think you would get a much more useful (ie accurate) answer from a prosecutor. His only client is the government. A defense lawyer you may only tell you what you want to hear, so that you will pay him. Besides, a prosecutor can talk to you about building a case and what goes into it, where as a defense attorney normally only see a case after it has been developed, and then has to poke holes it it from there.
... I think (and IANAL) that if this could be shown once, it would be proper to ask for all communications between the RIAA and their lawyers regarding any particular case in discovery. That should pretty much shut down their tactics. Can someone tell me why this doesn't happen? IAANAL: It's called the attorney client privilege. We rarely think about it except as an inconvenience, but it really does help our legal system remain fair and efficient (not that our system is either, but it could be worse).On the other hand, if you could find a memo between the RIAA and it's constituency or within one of the organizations, it should be fair game...
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The point of RICO is to deal with organizations made of disposable criminals. If you're trying to fight organized crime with ordinary laws, you run into the problem that gangsters can refill their ranks faster than you can investigate the individual people and convict them for their crimes, and most of the ones you can pin particular crimes on where doing it for higher-ups who don't commit any crimes directly and are sufficient nebulous in their control that it's hard to convict them.
Now, if RIAA employees were being regularly convicted of fraud or extortion for their work activities, but the RIAA was claiming that they didn't officially support this campaign, then RICO would make sense. But, in fact, any crimes being committed are being committed by the RIAA as a whole or its member organizations, so the obvious thing is just to charge them with their particular crimes.
IAAL and you would make a very good one as well. This is exactly the point I thought of when I read the article. In fact, mail fraud is undoubtedly the most often used predicate criminal act for civil RICO, and with good reason. It's almost impossible to conduct any business without using the mail in some way. If you allege that some enterprise is engaged in some type of ongoing fraudulent activity and they used the US mail on two or more occasions if furtherance of that fraudulent scheme, you are well on your way to satisfying the pleading requirements for civil RICO.