The Writing on the Wall: Time to stop the downloading mob
Mafia tactics of the RIAA make mockery of justice at our expense
By Brian Goodman, opinion editor
Posted on February 15, 2007

Before he was running for president, before he was an international hero, even before he was mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It was in this office in the mid-1980s that he first made a name for himself with his tenacious prosecution of the mob. The success Giuliani had in “wiping out the five families,” as he said, was the platform that propelled him into City Hall in 1993.

But now Giuliani has left the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York for the campaign trail, and in his absence, a new mob has rolled in: the Recording Industry Association of America.

Rather than relying on tired tales of boogey monsters and bedbugs, parents could scare their children by reading them legal depositions from the RIAA. The organization, which represents multiple recording companies, has become notorious for adopting and instituting tactics traditionally reserved for the mafia into U.S. courts as they hunt down and punish those who engage in illegal music downloading. It has initiated lawsuits against children as young as 12 and 13 years old; against college students with no financial recourse; against people who do not own or have access to computers; even against the deceased — it offered the family a 60-day grief period before initiating deposition against the dead man’s estate.

And it can come for you, too, regardless of whether you download a lot or not. On Feb. 6 it initiated a lawsuit against a man in Augusta, Maine, who allegedly downloaded a whopping five songs. Poor Scott Hinds, only one of the more than 18,000 cases filed by the RIAA, now faces a minimum civil penalty of $750 per song and the threat of criminal charges.

The tragic cease of Jesse Jordan, who entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., in the fall of 2002, offers a good demonstration of what happens when the RIAA comes a’ knocking at your dorm room door. Jordan was majoring in information technology, and took it upon himself to tinker with the Microsoft-based search engine technology on the RPI network; his tinkering ended up improving the quality of intranet searches, enabling any member of the RPI network to share any computer files they choose with each other. The search engine was not designed to facilitate circumvention of copyright law, and Jordan did not have control over how individual users used or abused the program.

None of that mattered to the RIAA, which served Jordan with papers in April of 2003, demanding a minimum settlement for his “willful infringement” of $15 million. In negotiation, the RIAA discovered that Jordan’s savings amounted to no more than $12,000, and demanded $12,000 to dismiss the case. Jordan and his family wanted to fight, but their lawyer explained that, though they could fight and could even win, it would cost at least $250,000 to do so, with no way to recover the money. Much like when the mob demands protection money, you either pay a lot now or pay all you have later.

Back in the Southern District of New York, one woman had decided that she had enough. The RIAA took 42-year-old Patti Santangelo of suburban Wappingers Falls, N.Y., to federal court in 2005 for allegedly sharing six songs on KaZaA. Rather than capitulating, the mother of five refused to settle and began publicizing her case, becoming a poster child for the Internet-freedom crowd. Again relying on its mob-like tactics, the RIAA decided to contain Santangelo’s publicity by dropping charges against her in December of 2006. But instead of letting the case die, the RIAA then sued two of Santangelo’s children, Michelle and Robert, for the same infractions.

Michelle Santangelo did not respond to the lawsuit and was ordered to pay $30,750 in default judgment as a result. Her brother Robert, however, has hired the same lawyer who defended his mother and responded at length to the charges. The lengthy 32 defenses Santangelo offered claim, among denials of culpability, that the RIAA has violated antitrust laws and made exorbitant threats, all in a “wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States.”

The RIAA, with its bottomless bank accounts, teams of lawyers and political connections, flippantly responded: “The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.”

The irony of calling its second attempt on the Santangelo family “recycled” notwithstanding, it is a disgusting state of affairs that, in the very same court where Giuliani handed down the most decisive blow to the mob in the last half century, the RIAA legally uses mafia tactics to destroy the lives of anyone it can get within its grasp. Regardless of one’s feelings about copyright law and music downloading, such a flagrant abuse of power, money, influence and the U.S. courts is a reprehensible blot on the façade of justice we in America claim to have.

The RIAA must be stopped, and one can only hope that the Santangelo family is the one to do it. Where is a mob-busting U.S. Attorney like Giuliani when you need one?

Brian Goodman is a senior communications major.