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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.
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?
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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.
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Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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!
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