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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."
... a prosecutor about the possibility of a RICO charge and not a defense attorney?
It really came down to the fact that I have not murdered anyone. Yet.
Greasing the right palms will let you break the law and get away with it, too.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
malicious civil prosecution and filing spurious, meritless, lawsuits need to become crimes with a 366 day maximum jail sentence
FGD 135
Asking about RICO is a red herring; ask instead about anti-trust - you know, price fixing, market collusion.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
We can get memos and emails to leak out of redmond, D.C., Apple etc. but not the offices of the RIAA or their associated law partner's offices?
It would only take one memo or email showing that they knew a defendant was not guilty or that they have no real proof or that they know they are fishing for information in court to seriously harm their cause.
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?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
This argument presupposes that you actually had Kazaa installed and actually traded the files.
If some idiot^H^H^H^H^Hexpert from the RIAA gets my current IP address as the ID of someone who has shared music (I've never personally neither shared nor downloaded music
We have yet to see any good evidence that the stuff the RIAA uses to launch these suits even remotely passes muster for the legal requirements. Their experts keep saying it does, but a screen shot of data gathered through dubious measures isn't to be trusted. I'll mock up a screenshot showing anything you like if you give me an hour or so.
I mean, what if the RIAA starts pre-texting to get information about my account once they figure out that I don't have any open ports on my machine and there is no evidence I've ever done anything? Their assertion that an IP address is legally tied to an individual is a completely weak argument. Next they'll claim my firewall is an attempt to prevent them from breaking into my computers to collect the evidence they believe should be there.
I think there's a lot of evidence to support the fact that they're doing some pretty shady things. I mean, how many times have we heard about people who don't even own computers being sued? The RIAA just quietly drops the suit and moves on, hoping nobody will say anything.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That's going to be a difficult argument to make, given that Kazaa's default settings give users no reasonable expectation of privacy I was say it's a great deal easier if you widen your scope to include hardware. Thousands, if not millions, of PC users use Residential Gateways, which specifically state "increased security, yada yada yada" on the box. So although the SOFTWARE may be configured to be open (such as LimeWire), the user could easily argue that the HARDWARE provided the expectation. With NAT and obfuscated IP addresses it's a technicially sufficient explanation.
RICO was always going to be a stretch. The RIAA was, and still is behaving reprehensibly. The lawyers wanted some way to prove they were acting illegally, so they has a stab at the RICO laws. But these aren't designed to stop an entrenched cartel from suing its customers using inappropriate laws. They're disigned to combat actual organised crime. We're talking gangsters and organised fraud operations.
The only way to stop the RIAA is for someone to fight them on their terms, and win on the basis that the laws they're suing under don't apply to P2P filesharing. Given the possible costs - expensive even if the defendant wins - this is unlikely to happen.
... 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.
It has always seemed to me that demanding money from someone, and threatening to financially ruin them if they don't comply, is nothing more than extortion. Does the RIAA's activities amount to extortion, and does extortion carry a jail sentence?
"Enacted in 1970, RICO allows for additional jail time in the case of criminal prosecutions--and heavier civil penalties for lawsuits--if the person or entities involved are found to be part of an ongoing criminal enterprise."
I would call the baseless allegations about copyright infringement exactly that. Extortion at the LEAST.
Since copyright infringement is a CIVIL matter, the RIAA has used criminal laws to reach it's ends. SLAPPING
people who can ill afford a defense. They ARE a criminal racket, and as such, need to go away.
RICO was always going to be a stretch. The RIAA was, and still is behaving reprehensibly. The lawyers wanted some way to prove they were acting illegally, so they has a stab at the RICO laws. But these aren't designed to stop an entrenched cartel from suing its customers using inappropriate laws. They're disigned to combat actual organised crime. We're talking gangsters and organised fraud operations.
Except RICO has become a way to dog pile on a defendant to get them to plea bargain by threatening much higher penalities if they are found guilty. It gives them a bigger hammer to use.
As one lawyer friend put it - You want to learn about right and wrong - seek religion. You want to learn about winning and losing - go to court.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Why are we still talking about Kazaa in 2007?
No answer for this has been showed for me yet, so I will attempt to answer.
From what I understand of these cases is that most of the lawsuits are being filed using information collected years ago, when Kazaa was widely used.
Nixon didn't get into trouble for recording conversations that he was a part of - he got into trouble because those recordings revealed that he was aware of illegal activities being performed on his behalf, or on his orders.
IANAL!
If there must be explicit causation to bring racketeering charges against the RIAA that revolve around mail fraud, wire fraud, or a set of crimes that net over 1 year in jail, the obvious choice to me is mail fraud.
They have consistently misrepresented the facts they have in hand about any actual person in their "Settlement Offer" letters. These attempt to defraud consumers by making false claims about the evidence they have in hand regarding a particular person's innocence or guilt. These false claims are done for the purpose of self-enrichment.
If I file suit in federal court alleging I think that FamousPersonA is a wife-beater and then send a letter to FamousPersonA saying, "Settle with me and I'll drop the suit", I believe this is a form of blackmail. If I know that I have a larger legal team than they do and can outlast them at trial or in any countersuit, then I have unlimited means to extort money from FamousPersonA. Or, anyone else.
The claims are False because the RIAA purports to have proof of guilt. These are overly confident, overstated positions. They constitute a fraudulent mail scheme. They are individually punishible and form a pattern of intimidation and attempted blackmail.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
Kinda like running an defaulted Wifi AP gives users no reasonable expectation of privacy?
Yet people get busted for "stealing wifi".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I would like to see Steve Ballmer's Ubuntu 7.04 GNOME desktop. He is using Evolution to compose a message to billg, suggesting they drop this whole silly Vista business and rebuild Windows on a stable Unix base. His signature uses ASCII art of a fluffy kitten holding his business card.
An Open Office document is also visible, explaining in Ballmer's own words that it's ok Linux is built on "Interlectural Propperty" stolen from Microsoft, because Linux had it first.
Amarok is visible, playing the sort of song we can imagine Mr Ballmer humming along to.
You are free to add other touches.
You have forty-five minutes.
With the big group, why aren't there any noticeable pricing differences? Cost of copies is negligible,so there's only one answer, most likely collusion.
Just because everyone charges the same price for a CD does not mean there is collusion. The problem is, CD's are not fungible -- you can only get a U2 CD (legally) from one source, the record label that works with U2.
If you could get U2 CD's (legally) from multiple sources that were in competition with each other, and they still all charged the same price, then THAT might be evidence of collusion.
If people didn't care about which CD they were buying, and only want any old CD, and all CD's were still the same price, that might be evidence of price-fixing as well.
But neither of these are reality -- the fact that a U2 CD and an Usher CD cost about the same amount of money simply means that the record companies can sell a lot of CD's at the current price, and that's what they are priced at. Actually, you can probably get an ABBA CD a lot cheaper than the U2 CD, because the market sets the price, and it's hard to sell an ABBA CD for the price of a new U2 CD. But the fact that the Usher CD and the U2 CD are the same price is not evidence of price-fixing -- if the label selling U2 CD's dropped their price by $2 a CD, you wouldn't expect all of the Usher fans will become U2 fans. Musical taste doesn't usually work that way. Simply put, there isn't a competitive market for CD's like there are for many consumer goods -- each CD is represented (usually) by only a single record label, so there is a single source for the CD, so there CAN'T be collusion on price, at least not for any particular CD.
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
That's going to be a difficult argument to make, given that Kazaa's default settings give users no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Not everyone uses Kazaa, though. I'm sure there's plenty of geeks out there who use torrents, unpopular p2p clients, etc., who possibly encrypt their harddrives, protect them with passwords, etc.
While the majority of people sued by the RIAA may not adequately protect their material, all we would need would be a few incidences of the RIAA snooping on protected computers to bring RICO against them (IANAL).
The likely problem is that the RIAA just preys on easy targets; their whole objective is to successfully sue a number of people to scare the rest of the populace into compliance. They couldn't possibly litigate against everyone; it would be too expensive.
What we need to do, is set up some computers that are technically "protected," but are accessible through some well-known vulnerability/exploit used to bypass the user's password, and fill them to the brim with pirate data. Then with any luck the RIAA will slip and sue the holders of said computers, who should in turn contact the ACLU.
I read in another /. post somewhere that you only need two incidences of the crime in question to bring RICO charges against the corporation.
Sounds like a good idea. There's no way a person could have done $750 worth of damage by downloading a song licensed over iTunes for 99 cents.
Anyone remember when all of the (poor, poor) doctors were crying about frivolous lawsuits, and pushing for litigation to reduce them? What happened there? It seems to me that (IANAL and TINLA etc etc) that the RIAA lawyers blatantly display a lack of due diligence when suing people without computers, etc, so wouldn't this be covered by what little (vague) anti-frivolous-lawsuit laws we do have in place? Interesting that the right-wing is all up-in-arms when their own (read: rich doctors) are the victims of frivolous lawsuits, and yet a glaring example of frivolity such as RIAA "shotgun litigation" happens, and they're strangely silent on the issue, and would go so far as to pass the DMCA, almost in blind support of said litigation.
--"insert clever quote here"