If Pepsi thought I was filling Pepsi bottles with shoe polish and shipping them off to stores, they’d need a warrant to search my alleged bottling operation. If cops thought I had a kilo of cocaine in my mattress, they’d need a warrant to search my house. Heck, even if I was suspected of building a freakin’ bomb in my basement, the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution requires that the authorities establish probable cause before they kick down my door. But if the RIAA, in its super-sleuth opinion, thinks your California pressing plant, warehouse, garage, basement, or treehouse might be the source of an illegitimate copy of, say, MC Hammer’s Too Legit To Quit, well then you better damn well hide your shoe polish, coke, and nitroglycerin.
The RIAA has thrown its weight behind California Senate Bill 550, which was introduced recently by democrat Sen. Alex Padilla and which cracks down on CD/DVD counterfeiting in some draconian and arguably unconstitutional ways. The bill would make it illegal to so much as own any equipment capable of pressing discs without the legally required stamp of copyright legitimacy, or any equipment capable of forging the stamps, but that’s not all. SB550 would also make it so that no warrant is necessary for police to search a pressing plant suspected of piracy.
The problem as the RIAA sees it is that many legitimate pressing plants are also cranking out fakes on the side. Therefore the RIAA thinks it should be no big deal for cops to be able to march right into a privately-owned place of business and inspect the line, unannounced, at any time, to make sure it’s all up to snuff. After all, the RIAA argues, there are already Fourth Amendment exceptions in cases such as gun shops, massage parlors, nursing homes, and wholesale fish distributors. You know, ‘cuz preventing knockoff Lionel Ritchie albums is just as essential to society as stemming the tide of guns, human trafficking, elderly abuse, and questionable food safety.
While lawyers and scholars up and down the Golden State are questioning the constitutionality of the bill, there does still seem to be a decent chance of it passing. The LA Times reports that the measure has already “sailed through two state Senate committees, one unanimously and one by a 5-2 vote… The bill goes to a final committee hearing Monday, then to the Senate floor. If it passes, it goes to the Assembly.” CD and DVD replication are big business for the state, as is its stature in the entertainment industry, and so of course it’s a top priority to root out corruption in those ranks. And we’re all just sick and tired of corruption, aren’t we? I mean, when Wall Street bankers are suspected of insider trading or fuzzy accounting, we don’t really need a warrant to storm their corporate offices, do we? And, as Techdirt smartly posits, the RIAA’s member labels surely have no problem with us wandering into their offices at any time to make sure their royalty payments to artists are all in line, right?
The bill is not without its opponents and questioners, though. In the LA Times piece, Robert Fellmeth (executive director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego) points out that SB550 lacks even a standardized basis for suspicion of counterfeiting. “If I were in the Legislature, I would say I want some kind of reasonable suspicion,” said Fellmeth. “I would not want simply to leave an open door for the police.” CD/DVD replication companies are also naturally none too enthused at the prospect of the bill. ”They are welcome to come to our facility any time, 24 hours a day, if they ever thought we were doing anything illegal,” Dave Michelsen, general manager of CD Video Manufacturing Inc. in Santa Ana, told the LA Times. ”We’re pretty open with [the RIAA]. But I don’t want to have a law that says our premises could be invaded any time without a warrant.”
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