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MPAA, Microsoft Testify Piracy Funds Terrorism
GuyMannDude writes "[Yesterday's] Oversight Hearing on "International Copyright Piracy: Links to Organized Crime and Terrorism" featured the MPAA and Microsoft testifying that software and movie DVD counterfeiting is an acute problem, with criminal gangs operating factories in Russia, Malaysia and other countries that have weak copyright laws. They further claim that intellectual property piracy is a vehicle for financing or supporting acts of terror." There's another article about the hearing at Infoworld.
Yeah and Osama Bin Laden is sittin in a cave in Afghanistan with a buncha cds and a burner!
I mean, sure, I can buy drugs, or pirate music/movies/games. But, I can also drive an SUV, or use oil in other ways. I can also support terror by being critical of the government, or being supportive of the use of encryption and privacy. I mean, so many options, so much terror. Where does one start?
Oooookkkkkeeeey... So I'm supposed to believe that religous extremists, in thier war against the West and the Western culture, are financing operations by pirating and spreading the very thing that they are against.
It's kind of like hardcore Vegans raising money for a campaign by holding a sausage sizzle.
Complete bullshit.
--
Simon
Want to demonize something but have now real information to back it up? Just say it fund terrorism, works every time!
Nan
God is real unless declared integer.
Wait a minute. We need tougher laws in the United States, because organized crime gangs in Russia and Malaysia are counterfitting Windows CDs (including the hologram, so people can't tell it's not official) and selling them, which is already illegal? What exactly can the USDOJ do to stop this?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
If you can download it for free, that would undercut the piracy market which is funding terrorist.
Put your wares online for America!
...everyone uses terrorism to push their agenda. I'm so sick of that phrase. Don't like something that people are doing? Tell them that it funds terrorists, and they'll stop. I suppose it works -- the average person probably believes this crap.
I was so pissed the first time I saw the commercial with the teenagers saying "I helped terrorists because I bought a dime bag" (or whatever). 9/11 was a *terrible* event, yes, but to try to make people think they're partly responsible because they commit some petty crime? Total BS.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
Because, with all the money saved on a pirated copy of MS Office, you can afford to go on vacation.
I don't think terrorism is a good thing, but I'm getting sick of all the reports:
"Sometimes, _________ is used to fund terrorism, so _________ is evil."
Drugs are bad because buying them funds terrorism. Yep, that's right. Even when it's homegrown. :P
I know that all those media conglomerates are the true source of funding for these things. So I'm going to buy my movies from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and friends from now on.
I'm sure I could find just as sketchy of a connection between the media companies and terrorism as they can find between [insert comman activity here] and terrorism.
Trees everywhere, and not a forest in sight.
but undemocratic countries around the world are using exactly the same trick to get rid of everybody who talks about free elections too loudly. Let's shoot the suckers, we're fighting terrorism! It has been 1 1/2 year since 9/11 and the Bush administration still has no exact definition of the word "terrorist". That is good for US foreign policy, but non-US citizens pay for this with their lives.
BULLLLLLLLLLLLSHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!
This is nothing more than a power grab. Plain and simple. That's the only explaination.
You want to know who's funding Osama bin Laden? Osama himself is. That wacky guy has almost $300 million dollars, and it's all his. He's bankrolling his own operation. We've already proven that his buddies have also been funding him, too. Hardcore militant Arabs are all about one thing: sticking to their guns and ousting technology in favor of hardline Muslim rule. That means oppressing women, forcing their will on people, and keeping things in the stone age. The only two uses they have for technology is A) Keeping Osama alive (he's on kidney dialasys) and B) using it against us to further his agenda.
Microsoft and the MPAA/RIAA are only concerned about two things: losing money, and keeping control over their respective industries.
I have only two words for them: Fuck 'em.
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
If the current big evil was pollution, I'm sure they'd be coming up with some way to say that piracy was causing pollution... surely all those poorly run pirate factories are big polluters, right?
I would guess that a lot of the anti-civil-liberties laws that got shoved through recently were not created recently. I bet they were just waiting around for a good enough excuse that the public would accept it.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
They are whatever they decide will make them money today.
NEWS FLASH!
All black market activities fund terrorism in one way or another. That is how the black market works. Alcohol sales funded terrorism in the US during prohibition. Cocaine, stolen art, fake Levi jeans, ivory, all contribute to terrorism.
If we had a black market in Barbie dolls the money would be used to fund terrorism.
x "is used to fund terrorism" isn't really an effective argument for more controls over x. It is a better argument for making x freely available so that there will be no black market for it.
Obviously the MPAA and MS wouldn't go for the idea but they are the ones creating the black market with their licensing requirements. If they really cared about avoiding the funding of terrorism they would let whoever wanted to copy their stuff copy it freely.
Anyhow, why are they spending their energy harassing p2p users when they have the real hardcore criminal gangs to go after? Could it be because the average p2p user don't have bombs?
Coding Blog
is that you should create your own pirate copies at home, rather than chance buying a pirate copy that could fund terrorism.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Mod parent up. This is the gaping, Mack Truck-sized hole in the argument.
The only rational way to argue that piracy funds terrorism is that organized pirates sell pirated copies and transfer the funds to terrorist organizations in order to buy weapons, supplies, Swiss-Army Knives, Freedom Fries and other terroristy things like that.
If all piracy takes place on P2P networks, there's no cash, and thus no profit for Al-Qaida or Iraq.
There are real activities that fund terrorism, such as the illegal sale of oil from sanctioned countries and diamond and gold mining. Trading the latest Britney Spears track, the latest Hollywood movie DVD rip, or the latest Microsoft OS ISO rip is so far removed from terrorism that it's laughable to try to associate them. This is an ad hominem attack of the most blatant kind.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Read that again - federal felony for
- You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!
We shouldn't dismiss outright, but assertions require proof, and extraordinary assertions require extraordinary proof. Without proof a claim must be considered mere speculation.
/. whenever a story about the DMCA or Microsoft is posted? Such arguments are no more valid when they are presented by a corporation to a Congressional committee than they are when presented by one of us in this forum. They just have a larger and more influential audience.
Minds certainly should remain open, but if the claimant provides no facts to support the claim and instead depends on an appeal to a pre-existing emotion for validation (in this case justified outrage over the results of terrorism) then the claim trivializes itself.
Don't we see similar "appeals to outrage" here on
...if only our elected officials had the cojones to say it out loud.
The black market in software and pirated DVDs only exists because there is a profit to be made by selling those pirated items.
If you make it possible to obtain those items without paying for them (i.e. P2P networks), then there's no profit to be made by selling individual discs!
Thus: Napster, Kazaa, and Gnutella are fighting the war on terror!
Do you?
Hlack market economies create violence. All of them. They have no real choice. The reason is simple: no recourse to the law.
What do you do if you buy a bottle rum at a liqour store and find out it's nothing but water? You call the police and have that jackass arrested for selling bogus merchandice.
What do you do if you buy some weed from a dealer and it turns out to be catnip and oregano? Call the cops? Last person I heard about that did that was arrested. No. You either live with the fact that you got ripped off or you shoot the sonofabitch.
Because the sale, puirchase and distribution of pot, or any other illegal drug, requires that the manufacturers/growers, distributors, sellers and end consumers all operate outside the law. This leaves them only one recourse when things go bad. This also leaves them no choice in how to deal with conflicts of any kind.
If legalized and sold through normal sales channels, drugstores (hey, that's a catchy name) drug-related violence will drop like a stone. If you can call the cops because that jackass at the corner pharmacy cuts his stock of Vantage Ultra Gold Columbian with catnip then you don't have to shoot him for it. If he knows that he can call the coips because you passed a bad check he knows he dowsn't have to shoot you for trying not to pay.
It's like the liqour business durring prohibition, or the porn industry when it was illegal to make blue movies, or like prostitution is right now. When you make something that people want illegal, you create a lawless subculture that is infested with violence.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
One of the big successes of the anti-drug propaganda war is what you have pointed out, the way the authorities have been able to blame the problems of prohibition on the drug itself.
Now, just because prohibition causes problems is not necessarily an argument against prohibition; it is simply part of the cost-benefit analysis. Alcohol prohibition worked to some extent, it cut alcohol consumption in half. However, the general public decided that the costs of prohibition outweighed the benefits of reducing alcohol use.
When it comes to pot, all the scientific evidence shows that it is less harmful than alcohol; it isn't possible to overdose (unlike alcohol "poisoning"), there are no serious diseases proven to be caused by it (unlike cirrhosis of the liver), and it is not nearly as addictive (read up on delirium tremens, then find any description of pot addiction). Since pot is even less harmful than alcohol, there is even less reason to accept the cost of prohibiting it, as compared to alcohol.
Now with other drugs, like heroin, the benefits of reducing consumption may outweigh the costs of enforcement. Unfortunately, governments rarely bother to even admit the costs of prohibition, preferring to blame everything on the drug. The result is that people are forced to choose the more dangerous mind-altering substance, Alcohol. They must risk arrest in order to make the more responsible and intelligent choice of using pot, the least harmful mind-altering drug.
-- Pot is safer than Beer