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How the RIAA has Dodged RICO Charges

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the still-quite-a-racket dept.

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."

2 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Shouldn't they be asking ... by Nukenbar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. RICO is a bit inappropriate here by iabervon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.