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Film Piracy, Organized Crime and Terrorism
flip-flop writes "The RAND Corporation has just released a lengthy report titled "Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism" which attempts to link all three. The authors suggest that organized crime might be financing itself in part through movie piracy (PDF) — and in three out of 14 of their international case studies, they claim that profits from piracy end up with suspected terrorist organizations. But now for the interesting part! Quote from the preface: 'The study was made possible by a grant from the Motion Picture Association (MPA).' Ah, what a surprise..."
The RAND Corporation has made a video summary of the report as well. TorrentFreak has an article disputing some of the report's claims, focusing criticism on RAND's interchangeable use of the terms "piracy" and "counterfeiting" — the report deals with the physical distribution of DVDs, making only brief mention of digital downloads. The MPAA and others have barked up this tree before.
Download Torrents, stamp out terrorism.
Since when does commercial counterfeiting have anything to do with public policy surrounding P2P?
And as the **AA is well aware, their high prices are the main driver of commercial counterfeiting.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If something's available for less there's always someone who will buy it. The only solution therefore is to make this stuff available for free and starve the "terrorists" and "organised crime syndicates" of money. Anyone who opposes peer-to-peer networking supports terrorism.
Yeah, sure, al-Quaeda and the mob have got be in it for all the ginormous heaps of money to be made e.g. from sharing ripped screeners for free on P2P networks, or selling camcorder copies on backyard markets at pennies above the price of the blanks.
Occam's razor points elsewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse
Anyone have a torrent of the video version?
This guy's the limit!
It's the wet dream of any business to get protection from the government, financed by taxpayers by classifying themselves as target that needs to be protected from organized crime and terrorists. We could just send all the people who have torrent installed on their computer to Gitmo as a preventive measure. I can't believe the nice people we see on Oscar night are plotting this.
Is the current economic downturn responsible for organised crimes' inability to make a profit without being subsidised by "piracy". I hear that drugs are equally unprofitable these day. what would they do without copyright infringement, eh?
If you are talking about the sales of illegal copies of CD's, then this is likely to be a source of income for organised crime. In Hong Kong the sales of pirated disks is as a matter of fact a source of income for the triads, highly organised crime. And besides that, the whole sale of infringing materials is illegal (possibly a crime: not everything illegal is a crime), so almost by definition the organisations doing this are organised crime.
The link with terrorism is not too far fetched, as again terrorism is for sure illegal and presumably criminally so, and it tends to be organised, thus lots of terrorist organisations fall under organised crime as well simply for being criminal and organised.
Luckily (in a way), most piracy a.k.a. copyright infringement these days is file sharing between individuals, and no money changes hands in the process. Well maybe some advertising income for the torrent tracking site or so, but that's all then, and if even The Pirate Bay can barely cover cost, most other tracker sites will be running at a loss. Not much money for funding crime there, then.
I guess it is not impossible, but I think there are easier ways to finance crime than going out to sea, raid ships and steal the DVD's on board.
Which you surely put in quotes for a reason (as in the words of Richard M. Stallman):
Terrorists use planes. Pirates use boats.
So there would be less money for organized crime if everyone downloaded music and movies, in stead of buying pirate copies?
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with catsup.
So, commercial movie piracy is funding terrorism. But if people can make their own bootleg copies, they won't buy the commercially pirated movies, and so the terrorists will go belly up.
So fight terrorism, put that movie on p2p today!
Meanwhile, the commercial pirates often pass their copies off as legitimate. Even retail outlets can be fooled sometimes. Don't risk supporting terrorists, download that movie!
I pay nothing for any of their releases. Some of them have gone on the record stating that they do it just because they like to. Now I suppose if someone burned those rips and sold them they could fund terrorism. Or alcoholism, or about anything else.
Ah - these days we have the 'terrorist ghost', earlier we had the 'communist ghost'.
I wonder what's next.
The worst thing is that the gullible public falls for it. Especially those that aren't up to date with all details - like members of various courts.
It is of course possible that there are terrorist factions that makes money from counterfeiting and duplication of music&movies, but considering that counterfeit products often are cheap and sometimes have bad quality it must be a minor source of income when all production costs are paid. And download from torrents must be a very thin source of income.
It must be a lot easier to make money from cocaine and other drugs since they have a much higher price when they are offered to the consumer. Weapons are also more interesting to trade in for terrorists. Transfer of a load of AK47:s and other items to an African country can provide a decent profit. Think Somalia & pirates and where they did get their weapons.
Extortion and various types of scams are also good income sources. Check out Hells Angels, Bandidos and other organized crime gangs. Just be aware that those gangs are the soldiers on the field, connect the traces and you can end up in surprising places.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
There is a fundamental difference between economic and non-economic piracy. The first is making money on the works of others while the other one is sharing the works of others without any interest in money. It's a bit sad that piracy is a term that could mean either one or the other. You must clarify what kind of piracy you mean when debating. I usually call it non-profit-piracy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It seems that the definition for terrorism has been broadened (see USA Patriot Act) and that it doesn't take that much these days to be a "suspected" terrorist. Also consider that you're now prohibited by law from being aware of this official suspicion. The Obama DOJ, just this past week, did some legal maneuvering to avoid a ruling on whether the president can detain someone indefinitely without charges. That is, they filed charges, which is the Right Thing, but they did it in order to render the pending lawsuit moot. Just like the Bush DOJ did with Jose Padilla. In the current climate, RAND could write some pretty far fetched things that would not end up being that far fetched.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Precisely, by this logic, giving tax dollars to major torrent trackers and making their use compulsory (and probably even taught in schools ;-)) would cut off financing for mobsters and terrorists... ;-/
Bringing down western civilization by downloading episodes of Battlestar Galactica instead of paying for cable.
Thank you MPA for saving the day!
For a fast solution, ban movies.
Buy a legitimate copy and a good deal of the profits end up in the hands of terrorists via the huge amount of drugs abused in Hollywood anyway.
If you love America(/your country), use p2p.
Organized crime would most likely love to have online P2P stopped.
Of course the MPAA would love that, they keep saying so every chance they get!
You can't take the sky from me...
If you purchase a movie legitimately, a good chunk of the profits end up in the hands of terrorists via rampant drug abuse anyway.
Conclusion: If you love America (/country of choice), use p2p
Seriously, they propose that movies about drugs, murder, sex, and other illegal things go to fund drugs, murder, sex, and other illegal things? I'll just wear these earplugs while the universe pops out of existence.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
RAND was set up in 1946 by the United States Army Air Forces as Project RAND, under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in May 1946 they released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. In May 1948, Project RAND was separated from Douglas and became an independent non-profit organization. Initial capital for the split came from the Ford Foundation.
According to the 2005 annual report, "about one-half of RAND's research involves national security issues."
Many of the events in which RAND plays a part are based on assumptions which are hard to verify because of the lack of detail on RAND's highly classified work for defense and intelligence agencies.
The RAND Corporation has been criticized as militarist. Due to the nature of its work, the RAND corporation also frequently plays a role in conspiracy theories.
In April 1970, a Newhouse News Service story reported that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election.
RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and five principal locations.
Seems like a fine objective non-profit think tank to me, helping to improve policy and decision making through objective research and analysis.
Crikey RTFA.
It's about physical counterfeiting. It's why guys like DuPont Authentication Services
http://www2.dupont.com/Authentication/en_US/
offer various authentication technologies like 3D holograms for media protection.
I fixed the title for you.
Am I downloading communism or terrorism now?
Ah - these days we have the 'terrorist ghost', earlier we had the 'communist ghost'.
I wonder what's next.
The worst thing is that the gullible public falls for it. Especially those that aren't up to date with all details - like members of various courts.
Do you really think it is so implausible that organized crime would profit from an illegal industry? Al Qaeda is a "terrorist group." On a day to day basis, it is an organized crime group.
You seem to think that the proceeds from bootleg DVDs is small. If it was, nobody would bother bootlegging. Al Qaeda is known to have substantial capital, and they are the kind of group that requires a (relatively) fixed source of income to continue their operations. DVD sales would do fine in this respect. So would Afghan opium, which the Taliban has extensively invested in.
Considering that the RAND Corporation has done actual research -- and you have done nothing --I see no substantial reason to doubt their conclusions. Even the MPA connection is fine by me, despite the submitter's insinuations.
Whoah there cowboy! If I'm downloading films for *FREE*, how can that be financing anything? I mean, to "finance" something means getting money, right?
The RAND report says that counterfeiting levels are not likely to decline unless governments worldwide commit more resources to fighting counterfeiting and devise tougher laws to protect intellectual property.
Probably the only useful piece of information in the entire report, and something everyone already knew anyway. Thank you RAND. How much did the MPAA pay you for the "report"? I want to get in on that action.
But now for the interesting part! Quote from the preface: 'The study was made possible by a grant from the Motion Picture Association (MPA).' Ah, what a surprise..."
And if a study saying the opposite was funded by a grant from the EFF, none of you would even mention it. RAND is not going to sell out just because one study was funded by the MPAA. If they had been, they sure as hell would have found more than 3 out of 14
focusing criticism on RAND's interchangeable use of the terms "piracy" and "counterfeiting" -- the report deals with the physical distribution of DVDs, making only brief mention of digital downloads. The MPAA and others have barked up this tree before.
So...they release a study saying that the physical distribution of DVDs funds terrorism in some cases, and the response is well what about P2P? If they wanted to analyze the link between digital downloads and terrorism, then they would have done so. Has anyone here even done research design? At some point you have to limit what you're looking at.
It is still implausible why The Godfather or the average warlord would want to catch their share of cuts from a falling knife too, and should have found no avenues to criminal proceeds that are more profitable and rather effortless in comparison to imitating the burdensome physical distribution (against equally illegal "competition" from the dark side of P2P that has no such expenses) which makes it difficult to turn a profit even for studios themselves these days.
To get rich quick, anyone looking ahead to a life in jail if caught for running a sophisticated crime syndicate would probably rather want to deserve their time as a drug kingpin than for peddling fake DVDs.
I believe counterfeiting is the word were looking for here. Unless Terrorism is being funded by the ads hosted on Pirate Bay...
a building gets blown up.
Stop Piracy!!!
Note that, like buying lottery tickets from winners, selling pirated movies and music and software doesn't have to be profitable. It can be used for money laundering, which used to be a huge need for groups like the IRA and Al Queda, both of which relied on political contributions for their political causes. The IRA collected quite a lot of money from expatriates in the USA and throughout the UK: Al Queda gathers plenty of its funding from Saudi Arabian contributors, like Osama Bin Laden himself.
The RAND corporation will be employing Jack Bauer to help with their investigation torturing suspected grandmothers and little kids for the source of their illegal DVD copies of Sesame Street. Nevermind they don't have a DVD player, in which there are also unamerican so they deserve what is coming to them.
GOD BLESS MPAA.
Wait, the story is not a movie script? Nevermind...
There may be no 'next'. Terrorism is timeless and can be milked forever.
And the fear of not being 'with us' sill squelch a lot of people that disagree.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Al Qaeda is known to have substantial capital
Reading this I rather got the impression that they were strapped for cash most of the time, and what they had they had got through legal dealings with the US of other Bin Laden family parts.
So would Afghan opium, which the Taliban has extensively invested in.
Blatant misrepresentation. By 2000 the Taliban had banned opium production and by 2001,
. -- http://opioids.com/afghanistan/index.html
One wonders how important that was for the US to start the war in Afghanistan, considering that a lack of Afghan opium would be a severe problem for the so-called "War on Drugs" in the US, a war that the government wages against its own citizens.
I said in a private offline conversation (so I unfortunately cannot provide a link) at Christmas 2001 that I expected the Afghan opium production to be back at the world's number 1 within five years, and lo and behold,
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium (follow the references)
-- http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/2005_Afghan_opium_harvest_begins
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Well, it's the sale of counterfeit movies which can provide revenue to the groups producing them...
When you go to buy a movie, it's hard to tell wether it's counterfeit or not, so you *could* be giving money to these evil groups, wether they be terrorists or the MPAA.
So the answer?
Download for free, that way nobody evil makes any profit.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Because the existence of P2P (and DVD writers in most PCs these days) doesn't exactly lend plausibility to the assertion of counterfeit movies as an easy way to substantial funding?
Ah - these days we have the 'terrorist ghost', earlier we had the 'communist ghost'.
I wonder what's next.
That would be the ghost of common sense. Pretty sure that poor bastard is dead these days.
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
As long as they're pulling things out of their butts, why not add global warming and the japanese whale hunting?
Those replicated disks sold on street corners and at flea markets are a lot closer to what the official studios and producers should be pricing their legit disks at. If they would have gotten a little less price gougy way back when it became so cheap to stamp out disks, they would have nipped so called piracy in the bud. They weould have made it back on much larger volume sales then. Instead they just fixated at a ridiculously bloated "per unit" price and margin level they pulled out of their collective millionaire pointed haired media bosses asses, and now wonder why sales drop off.
Same with digital downloads, the old allofmp3 prices are a lot closer to what online download prices should be. Everyone on the planet knows what it costs to dupe media on disk or download, real legit prices should be just a little more than that and no more. You make entertainment media be closer to impulse buy pricing levels that actually reflect modern tech replication advances, you'll sell a LOT more, and still make profit, but they waited too long to even think about that. All those decisions on prices are made by multi millionaires living a muilti millionaire lifestyle, they have no idea what 10 or 20 bucks is to regular working class folks, they are clueless, zero frame of reference.
Heck, go ahead and absolutely double street pirate prices, that would still be far cheaper than what the **AA members offer now. 10-20 bucks for a download or a stamped disk is ridiculous price gouging.
Semi car analogy, gas prices. If all the biz news said-example- that a barrel of crude was 50 bucks but the prices at the pump were 20 bucks a gallon, people would know they were being price gouged, and no matter how much the oil producers and refiners tried to spin it with "well, it costs us so much to do this and.." people would know that was complete bullshit.
Same with these stupid media prices. I started buying and paying full retail for music in the *50s* and was a pretty loyal albeit smaller scale consumer all the way to the 90s (when disks took over the format) and it become beyond apparent they were systematically and in a huge fashion price gouging. I stopped, no more new entertainment media at those inflated prices. I voted with my wallet, they get zero from me when they used to get a few hundred a year (like I said, not much, but that doesn't count concerts and going to the movie theater either, and that used to be a little closer to serious money than it is today for that matter).
When I start seeing music CDs at two bucks a disk and brand new movies at three bucks a DVD, I'll start buying brand new again, and not until then. Right now, only marked down severely in the bargain bin to those levels or used at pawn shops and yard sales, etc, that's it. And downloads? Even 99 cents for a few megs of music is a huge rip. It needs to be like around a dime. I don't pirate their stuff, but neither will I pay bloated millionaires fantasy prices either. The personal computer and advanced software and disk duplicators has made production costs, especially for music, a *lot* cheaper than it ever was, but official per unit pricing hasn't kept up with that cost savings.
Here's a link for your review.
Please read it before trying to be clever or insightful.See this piracy definition. Piracy IS copyright infringement.
Sorry for completely destroying you with facts and logic, but it had to be done.
at least as long as they keep scaring us with terrorist acts unless we support their policies...
hmm, or maybe they can be seen as organized crime, in the racketeering kind of way?
yay, i just proved that government is criminal. this cant be good...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I didn't rtfa, because I'll probably get an anurism. Can someone briefly describe to me how these idiots linked free downloading with profiting? Because I want to start doing this right away...
Of course they are connected with each other - after all, there's a good reason to why we call a certain organization MAFIAA...
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
This is so damn ridiculous that I couldn't help but laugh. How the hell can organized crime or terrorists make money out of free downloads?
But then again, as I considered it, they could make money out of bootlegs from the stuff they downloaded from torrents. There are mass disk burning operations where I come from, and since bandwidth isn't as cheap here (the highest bandwidth for residential accounts is, IIRC, 2Mbps) as it is in the US, people come to "bootleg bazaars" in droves to buy 16 movies-in-one DVD9s for PhP50 (~US$1).
This could indeed fund organized crime. It is certainly a possibility, as there is a market for bootlegs even though movies and other such content is freely available online. I myself bought more than 150 disks since DVDs went mainstream here (about 8 years ago) and I was still on dial-up, and almost everyone I know did the same.
Banning file-sharing won't actually do anything to stop this though, maybe if the damn movie/music industry would price their stuff more reasonably rather than spiking the price of every crappy new release, none of this would happen.
Right now, I blame RIAA/MPAA. If anyone's funding organized crime and terrorists, it's them.
I'm sure if you try hard enough, you can find a way to link the sale of any services or goods to terrorism. People with legitimate jobs have been found to be funding terrorism... they should write a paper linking that next.
i) Film Piracy - check
ii) Organized Crime - check
iii)Terrorism - check
iv) Pedophiles - fail
These RAND guys, they are absolute amateurs at this propoganda game.
The connection between terrorism and movies is plausible. I mean, I'm pretty sure that "Battlefield Earth", "Catwoman", and "The Love Guru" all have to be part of some kind of Al Qaeda plot.
That my love of free pr0n would make me a terrorist!
I'm glad this report placed me properly in society.
What's next, running Linux will make me a terrorist? What will my parents think? They tried to raise me right and all!
All of this MPAA/RIAA FUD only makes sense to politicians because they're on the receiving end of a nice fat check. Publishing this garbage to the masses is like pissing uphill and into the wind.
"This heroin just isn't selling at all. People can take it or leave it. Thank God for the Harry Potter DVDs!"
the resurgence in opium is due to the Taliban. They had initially allowed it while they were in power as long as it was for export only they viewed it as a weapon against the infidels. yes in 200 they did ban it but after the U.S. invasion a they need money and b it is once again seen as a weapon against the infidels. cant fight a war if you are all doped up or over dosed. But it really should be no surprise, this just in illegal groups use illegal means to fund their illegal activities more at 11. bake sales are too high profile and too low profit margin to make any money.
Considering that the RAND Corporation has done actual research -- and you have done nothing --I see no substantial reason to doubt their conclusions. Even the MPA connection is fine by me, despite the submitter's insinuations.
You're right that there's plenty of real money to be made from bootlegging, and in that respect the research is probably right, but the conclusions that they come to based on their research are completely wrong.
The fallacy here is that RAND is equating online piracy with bootlegging, and concluding that since bootlegging helps the terrorists, online piracy helps the terrorists. The reality is that online piracy and bootlegging are completely at odds. People who download torrents generally don't buy bootlegs because they can get better quality and cheaper online. If anything, online piracy hurts the bootlegging industry.
People respond irrationally when they're afraid, and the MPA is hoping to take advantage of this to get Americans to believe that torrents 'helps the terrorists' even though a rational look at the situation suggests exactly the opposite. This is a cynical and calculated PR move in the MPA's ongoing campaign against piracy.
It probably is true that buying bootleg dvds supports terrorism, so if you're a patriotic American, you should download torrents instead of buying bootlegged copies!
"I wonder what's next."
The Nationalization Ghost.
Look for it to become a household word just in time for the healthcare reform debate.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
you could link prostate cancer to Japanese school girls.
They are using fuzzy language and blurring the boundaries between terrorism and organized crime.
In Russia, organized crime is responsible for computer fraud and makes several millions of dollars per year through extortion and phishing. I doubt they're selling DVDs.
In India and Malaysia, the newfound technical skills of the cheap labor force is being put to use in phishing attacks earning several millions of dollars per year. I would believe they are funding terrorism. I doubt they're selling DVDs.
In China, organized crime and/or the government (whose lines are already blurred) have institutionalized hacking. There is more spam sent from Chinese servers than anywhere else. I doubt there is terrorism being funded. They are definitely selling DVDs.
In Africa, organized crime, governments, and possibly terrorists are using sophisticated scams to steal money and merchandise from westerners. They are definitely NOT selling DVDs. Nigeria, the hub of fraud in Africa, has a booming film industry. It has very little piracy or counterfeiting.
When I download a movie from bit torrent, no money is changing hands. I'm not supporting either organized crime or terrorism. It's neither piracy nor counterfeiting. It is not stealing anything from anyone. I have not cost anyone anything. I did not break any laws. The guy who puts the movie on the Internet is definitely guilty of civil copyright infringement. Anyone would be quite hard pressed to prove that he funded terrorism. The links are smoke and mirrors. Organized crime thrives through fraud and computer crime. Terrorism thrives through benefactors and fraud.
This report is one very narrow point of view from a very long distance.
They're using their grammar skills there.
How can a competely factual and rational post rebutting a totally wrong comment modded "insightful" be modded itself troll?? That makes absolutely no sense.
The fact is that piracy is well defined today to include copyright infringement. Dunbal got called out on it and it is not insigtful in any way.
No, that's a blatant misrepresentation. Read this story:
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND
... that is actually very unusual. Seems like someone's afraid.
Notable names include:
Donald Rumsfeld,
Condoleezza Rice,
Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Henry Kissinger,
James F. Digby,
(ohhh,we know how much we can trust those three)
On top of that several military experts, researchers in the field of nuclear warfare. Yeah there are also some interesting smart people in there but given the amount of theorists employed to develop and analyze war strategies this is a highly suspicious source of information to say the least. The MPAA lets a militarist thinktank develop a propaganda strategy against filesharing
I want to pay for a movie. In fact I'd pay quite a bit for a legit copy of "The Making of Summer Lovers" from 1982. But the intellectual property owner won't sell it to me. Occasionally someone will post a clip to youtube etc. only to have it shot down by the copyright patrol.
So if they care enough to enforce copyright, what do they plan to do with their rights?
Should it be legal to distribute copies if the copyright holder stops distribution?
... the wide availability of (free or very inexpensive) digital downloads is killing off the demand for counterfeit DVDs.
We're doing our part to deprive the terrorists of their sources of financing.
Have gnu, will travel.
Groups which operate illegally and try to achieve their goals with non legal means might use non legal means to finance themselves! What an important information! What's next? The money gained by robbing a bank might land in the hands of criminals?
The report says only what those who paid the RAND Corporation wanted it to say. The purpose of RAND is to try to hide the foolishness with intellectual argument.
Next reports from RAND:
Employees should agree that they are paid too much.
Rich people are wonderful leaders, and should be allowed to do anything they want.
The U.S. government's policy of killing people will bring peace.
The failures of banks in the United States were completely unforeseeable. When Warren Buffett predicted problems in 2002, he was talking about something else.
The U.S. government should buy more weapons. You never know when they will be needed.
Potato, Scuba diving, and Pumas
See! I can do it too!
Pirated downloads don't generate revenue for organized crime and terrorism. Spam is much more likely to do that. If RAND wants to make the world a better place with reports, linking spam to terrorism is the way to do it.
Afghan opium would be a severe problem for the so-called "War on Drugs" in the US, a war that the government wages against its own citizens.
We wage so-called wars on organized crime, gangs, and prostitution rings. We have always worked hard to break up criminal operations. Drug users are not some special group that deserve exception.
Just because you have a grip on your addiction doesn't mean a crackhead who is stealing spark plugs and DVD players has the same willpower you do.
If there is one thing I cannot stand, it is people with a pro-drug agenda who think all people have had positive drug experiences just like themselves. We have drug recovery programs for a reason. People have lost their savings, their family, everything they have owned because of an addiction to drugs.
It may not have destroyed your life, but making drugs legal/free/cheap/easier to get will be hell for so many others. In my town we just lost four teenagers in an car accident; they had been smoking salvia (which is legal) beforehand. If we are already struggling with the effects of "legal highs", how much worse will it get when we throw in currently illegal drugs into the mix?
I really wish we could have a "scared straight" program for you pro-drug people, where you could what drug addiction really does to people less fortunate than yourself. You may end up being less fond of letting the masses have drugs legally and cheaply. We struggle enough with alcoholism already, if you haven't noticed.
We wage so-called wars on organized crime, gangs, and prostitution rings. We have always worked hard to break up criminal operations. Drug users are not some special group that deserve exception.
Governments make the crime, criminals commit it. Legalize drugs and they are no longer criminals. Problem solved.
Just because you have a grip on your addiction doesn't mean a crackhead who is stealing spark plugs and DVD players has the same willpower you do.
Assuming that the person was addicted to drugs, how is it different then someone stealing spark plugs and DVD players to fill a "legal" addiction such as gambling, alcohol and cigarettes? Is stealing wrong, yes, but would these people have to steal to get their addiction if these drugs were regulated in the same way alcohol and cigarettes are regulated rather then all-out banned?
It may not have destroyed your life, but making drugs legal/free/cheap/easier to get will be hell for so many others. In my town we just lost four teenagers in an car accident; they had been smoking salvia (which is legal) beforehand. If we are already struggling with the effects of "legal highs", how much worse will it get when we throw in currently illegal drugs into the mix?
But similarly, if they had been drinking the results would have been the same, but look at what prohibition did, it simply made ordinary people into criminals and let unscrupulous people get rich. People need to know what these drugs can do, yes, but they need a way to look at it without the tinted lenses of "This is brought to you by the counsel for the elimination of drugs", this is like trying to teach abstinence only, its a good idea, but not everyone is going to follow it, and when they don't, bad things happen.
I agree with you, ideally we should not have drugs. Fact: Drugs exist. Fact: Drugs can be easily bought even with all of our regulations on it Fact: Because of the prohibition of drugs, the money that comes from drugs goes to lawbreakers, these lawbreakers then use the money to fund more crime. Fact: Drugs can ruin lives, marriages, and relationships, but so can a lot of legal things, alcohol, gambling, and consumerism
People will always get drugs, they have since the dawn of time, the war on drugs though makes sure that the people who get drugs end up handing money to the wrong people, those that will use the money not to benefit themselves and others but rather use the money for violence. These people who get rich, usually end up screwing those who buy from them by poisoning the drugs they sell, the free market solution (take them to court and sue them for everything they own), doesn't work because what they were doing was illegal, so no one wins.
*Disclaimer, I do not use drugs, yes, I have seen the affects of what drugs do, and seen the affects of what legal things do (gambling, drinking, smoking, etc) too
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The report repeatedly mentions online piracy and praises france's deal with ISPs.
It also misses several (inconvinient) key facts and has numerous logical errors.
The main reason why so much money can be made by counterfeiting movies in developing countries is because of the international scope of copyright combined with local and national licensing schemes and total ignorance of the rights holders to these markets.
If they were serious about preventing counterfeit sales in developing markets they would scrap region locks, abandon regional licensing (how this is considered legal anyway is beyond me) and make an effort to establish legal retail at affordable prices.
The report does touch upon the fact that the Yakuza's profits from pornography have collapsed thanks to the internet. Strangely though, it doesn't lose any words about the impact on counterfeit movies.
You are absolutely right in that drug addiction is bad. Addiction of any sort is bad, sex, gambling, video games. The definition of addiction is the persistence at an activity to the point where it has a negative impact on other portions of your life. The problem - as I see things, anyway, is that the prohibition, and the legal penalties for the possession and distribution of illegal drugs makes the problem worse, and reinforces and worsens the downward direction an addiction assumes, and makes it harder for legal, job-related and other reasons to recover from an addiction.
Prohibition is, furthermore, completely ineffective. It is easier for an underage person to purchase marijuana, cocaine, or crystal meth than it is for them to purchase alcohol.
You mentioned that four teenagers in your town died after smoking salvia - now, can you affirmatively attribute the cause of the accident to salvia? Had they consumed said salvia within 30 minutes (the effective length of time salvia affects the brain) of operating the vehicle? Or were they, in fact, teenagers - a demographic, that even when they are completely sober have the highest rate of automobile fatalities of all the demographics.
The problem is some presumption that prohibition is actually helping - legalization would give the government more control over the distribution of these substances, not less - because it would obliterate the black market, lowering significantly the profit margins of those interested in distributing it (currently Al Qaeda, the Taliban, various other large criminal organizations). It's simple economics that the prohibition of something creates a very profitable market for whatever is being prohibited, and it is simply sociology that shows that the legal prohibition of something does not eliminate the market for that which is being prohibited.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Outstanding comments by both Knuckles and Z00L00K.
One must always look at the backgrounds of the "fellows" at RAND (and every other "stink tank") prior to reading their "studies"....
Whenever a BUSH invades a country, the drug trade increases substantially (note falling cocaine processing production in Panama - under their, then present, and previous presidents - then Bush Senior invades and once again it sky rockets upwards).
Just as with the present US Secretary of the Treasury, Geithner, it pays to research his background: previous employee of Kissinger and Associates, memberships in the Group of Thirty, Council of Foreign Relations, and Bank of International Settlements.
The Turkish intelligence report on al Qaeda posited it as an ongoing intel operation, with some of its operatives working for Pakistani intelligence, some for British intelligence, some for American intelligence, etc.
Really, the masses need some thinning, and maybe drugs are the way to do it. Make them legal, then crack down on people who can't handle it. It's not the drugs that are the problem, it's what people do to get them, and people who are capable of controlling themselves don't have a problem there. There are a lot of things that we protect people from nowadays, and it's leading to the destruction of the human race. Once upon a time if you were an idiot you were likely to take yourself out of the gene pool, now idiots are protected. And like any endangered species, those protections can cause overpopulation if allowed to continue for too long.
Interesting, thanks for the link. So it seems that different UN representatives say different things. I retract my clear-cut statement and settle for "I don't know, then".
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Modded Funny, but your probably not just right, but right by orders of magnitude. The MPAA and RIAA are all for Orwellian surveillance to detect copyright violations, but probably not so much for the kind of surveillance that would make for easy interdiction of drug trafficking.
While I don't necessarily agree with our current drug laws, I am definitely not pro-drug and anyone deciding they can enjoy them as a strictly victim-less crime is sorely mistaken. Musicians whose music glorifies violence, drug use and crime, then cry and whine about p2p sharing should have a special level of hell reserved for them.
Letter To Iran
While RAND must be applauded for disclosing the funding participants, they still loose severely on credibility.
They are no longer an organization which I feel confident about as an organization providing policiticians or society in general with objective research.
As such they ought to be more serious about their research objectives and their reputation, by not allowing them to become puppets in disguise.
Their credibility is down the drain.
RAND research is no longer to be trusted.
With the potential of most botnets to stop spamming and start DDoSing entire nations within instants, bot-herders should indeed be prosecuted like any other suspect procuring the means for and possibly preparing a terrorist assault.
Then again, the DMA probably won't afford (or even appreciate) stor^H^Hudies like this these days to make the case for a crackdown on what are probably perceived as "just a few rogue advertisers" by many authorities, without realizing their botnets' capabilities to wreak havoc on more than just port 25...
Where did the Somali pirates get their arms..? Probably bought them with their ransom money. What do you think they are? Criminals?
Is the part about "helps funding organized crime". I always thought that the purpose of organized crime was to make moner, and that it was pretty much "self-sustained".
But now I find that those poor criminals must sell bootlegs to get a income while breaking the law (I suppose they do not know how to make money with burglary, assault, drug trafficking, etc.).
In the end, it must be true that "Crime does not pay".
Why can't
Geee... A corporation with it's HQ in Santa Monica/West LA taking a position that is pro-copyright/MPAA. I'm just shocked.
http://www.rand.org/about/locations/
We wage so-called wars on organized crime, gangs, and prostitution rings. We have always worked hard to break up criminal operations. Drug users are not some special group that deserve exception.
I think you misunderstand, or you are trying to misrepresent the issue. No one is saying drug users should be specifically exempt from law enforcement, the point is that the law should not define drug users as criminals. The question is not whether we should enforce some law, but whether that law should even exist.
Just because you have a grip on your addiction doesn't mean a crackhead who is stealing spark plugs and DVD players has the same willpower you do.
There are also drug users who do not steal. The crime here was theft, and we already have laws against that. Society is perfectly capable of punishing the drug user that steals. Why should we have additional drug laws that punish the drug user who does not steal? We do not punish the guy having a beer in a restaurant because someone else drives drunk.
This is interesting in that it seems to show that the Taliban are not in fact insane. But although I would like to believe that they are the same as their North American counterparts, the claim that they banned opium in order to increase prices makes no sense. Your quote itself indicates that production shifted to the US allies in the north, since the ban was indeed enforced and the 2001 crop "eliminated" in order to improve Afghanistan's image in the eyes of other countries. Within a few years the fanatical terrorists would in fact have stopped all drug production. This is scary, and it's a good thing we invaded.
Really, the masses need some thinning, and maybe drugs are the way to do it.
Drugs kill their users relatively slowly, and sometimes make them very violent and unpredictable. So, the people you targeted would still be likely to breed, and likely to take out plenty of others before they died. In fact, as they were driven to crime, they would be targeting the more productive members of society.
The argument is invalid, but not as a result of a fallacy.
The geek in full flight.
For a look at the full spectrum of RAND research: Browse by Category
Free downloads - PDF or HTML.
Here is the briefest of samplings from the RAND Classics:
Williams "The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy" 1954
Dresher "Games of Strategy: Theory and Applications" 1961
Dole and Asimov "Planets For Man"
Baran, ed. "On Distributed Communications" 1961-62
"A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" 2001
Shapiro and Anderson "Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail"
I'll save everyone time and give you the link:
Kahn "The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence" 1960
what kind of retards would smoke salvia and drive... jesus. Stupid people like that are the reason Amsterdam has changed so much :( Stupid bitch on mushrooms fell off a bridge >
I can see how film piracy can be used to finance terrorism, but only if the copies are actually sold for cash, and not distributed freely online.
Any counterfeit object can be used to finance anything. North Korea has a massive US currency scheme, and China offers just about anything counterfeit. Seeing as how the government controls the industries, the profits directly support the government.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
No, that's a blatant misrepresentation. Read this story:
I found it a little odd that I'd never heard of the METimes... until I looked here. I'm sure that a publication called the Middle East Time based in Washington D.C. is not at all biased... ;-)
CONTACT US Middle East Times 1133 19th Street, NW Suite 871 Washington, DC USA Telephone: (202) 898-8180 Editor: Claude Salhani claude@metimes.com Managing Editor: Grahame Bennett gbennett@metimes.com Email us at: contact@metimes.com editor@metimes.com subscribe@metimes.com advertise@metimes.com
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
1. Buy videocamera
2. Purchase movie ticket and $200 worth of concessions (i.e., 1 small Pepsi and a box of Milk Duds)
3. Put bad cam rip on P2P
4. ???
5. PROFIT
Considering that the RAND Corporation has done actual research -- and you have done nothing --I see no substantial reason to doubt their conclusions. Even the MPA connection is fine by me, despite the submitter's insinuations.
And you obviously don't know what research is, how to do it, or how to look at the results.
RAND have done research, so we may start with the facts they present and consider them correct for now. And then based on those facts we may draw our own conclusions. You are right to be critical about a research piece, and may even doubt someones conclusions without doing your own. Doubting the facts however then you should do your own research (or have strong reason to doubt it, such as other research you know about, but then that is the start of your own research in itself).
When reading some report, you should always be critical of the facts (see whether they pass sanity checks such as that the numbers add up properly and that are within reason), and you should doubt the conclusions. Conclusions are an interpretation of the facts, and are reason for doubt and discussion. Facts, if measured correctly, will be the same for all researchers. Try to come with other conclusions that explain the facts, when possible. And see whether those conclusions may be more likely than what the researchers say. Or think of ways to test conclusions: other tests and/or measurements of new facts that would prove your conclusion and disprove their conclusion, or the other way around of course.
Nothing that came out of RAND in form of publicized reports was ever worth the paper it was written on. I usually stray from such wide-stroke negatives, but RAND "reporting" people really deserve it. It's the worst case of conflict-of-interest and clandestine propagandizing ever. Just go read their reports, if you can. Go through them with a fine toothed comb. Will make your hair rise. Next time you see a fine toothed comb, you'll wish for lice.
In other news, a petroleum industry funded study revealed that electric cars are responsible for terrorism, the economic crisis, pollution, global warming, and sunspots.
Is it April 1st yet?
-Valen
the best study that money could buy...
RAND has also published results most Slashdotters would find agreeable. They've said that fundamental science research is carried out better by academia than by private industry, that global warming is real and that racial profiling doesn't work at all (because it's trivial to counter). All of their research is published in full on the RAND site, and the news snippet concerning the article in question actually reads, "Film piracy is growing venture for organized crime, profits occasionally support terrorism." Organized crime has many ventures, so that's reasonable enough to believe. That profits from organized crime might also end up with terrorists also isn't a stretch. It's not hard for money to travel far and wide today. I do think that RAND's conclusions aren't as remarkable as the Slashdot summary makes them off to be.
Another team funded by the MPAA, has determined there is a direct link between movie piracy and the sudden recent increased occurrence of open running sores on male and female genitalia, exploding babies, and the fatal bludgeoning of small hapless fury animals. Further research suggests that continued piracy may lead to the end of all life in the universe as we know it.
The authors suggest that organized crime might be financing itself in part through movie piracy (PDF)
I'm sorry -- but doesn't that miss the whole point of organized crime -- to wit -- organizing together for mutual success in criminal enterprise with the goal of MAKING MONEY. Organized crime doesn't finance an higher goal or sinister motive by committing crime, organized criminals engage in crime together in order to MAKE MONEY.
-GiH
This means that downloading movies (whether legitimately or not) rather than buying DVDs (whether legitimate or not -- since we really can't always tell the difference) is a counter-terrorism effort.
Long Live Counter-Terrorism!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
It's terrible, these days organised crime just can't make enough money of their traditional business, they have to turn to pirating Britney Spears CD's to finance their core business.
The RAND corporation - the best research conclusions money can buy.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I'll agree with you further on this.
A large number or people who die through drug abuse actually die because the drugs are improperly made/laced. Legalise the drugs and control over their contents can be had. Not only providing a safer drug taking society but also allowing a easier route for people coming off the drugs (similar to nicotene patches for cigarette smokers).
This is starting to sound like the witch test from Monty Python and The Holy Grail.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
You make very good points and I agree with all what you have mentioned, except for the part that said al-Qaeda's funding was : "through legal dealings with the US of other Bin Laden family parts."
The Bin Laden business empire is well respected in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. They are not the same as Osama. In fact they are against him, if nothing else for the ill repute that befell on it because of his family name.
Remember that Bin Laden had three phases: one before 1990, one during the 90s, and one after Sept 11. The first phase is when he was a good guy in the Muslim world and in the West because he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. No one saw him as a bad guy then. In 1990, he had a spat with the King of Saudi Arabia after Saddam invaded Kuwait. The end result was that he preached against the king, who dropped his citizenship. He left to Sudan, where he was joined by the ideologue Ayman El Zawahri who changed him from a reformer/resistance to someone who targets the West. This is when the East Africa and Cole bombings happened. Then officially, the two groups merged (Zawahri's and Bin Laden's). September 11 happened shortly after that, and Bin Laden became the most wanted and in hiding.
Here is a piece of relevant information: Back in the mid 1990s, before all that, I was sitting on a flight next to a pharmacist who worked for one of the Bin Laden family businesses (medical supplies or something). We had a lengthy conversation. He told me, among other things, that Bin Laden's immediate family (wife and kids) were living in Medina, and their relatives were supporting them financially, but in a very strange method to prevent any cash from reaching Osama. The school bills were paid by cheques to the school. Food and groceries were obtained by them by going to a store, and then the relatives paying the store directly for what they consumed. The whole idea was to prevent any cash from reaching Osama. And that was way before Sept 11 was even an idea in his mind. At that time he was an enemy of the Saudi state and ruling family, not an enemy nor a threat of the West.
So, I don't believe any claims that his family, or anyone in Saudi Arabia would fund Al Qaeda directly and incur the wrath of royal family. Anything that claims that, let alone claim the Bush family had dealing with Osama (as much as I am against W) is flat wrong. Dealings with the greater Bin Laden family and business empire? Sure? Any of that reaching Osama? No way!
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Sorry if it came across as if I was saying that the family was funding Osama. That was not my intent, though I knew when writing that I was abbreviating this part too much. I was really talking about the early time when he had still some money from being part of the family and "a good guy". That was not his only funding of course, either. Later we know that monies came from different sources, often donations from islamists.
Anyway, I did simply not want to waste all too much time on an AC post that said "Al Qaeda is known to have substantial capital", because that just too wrong to do so.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns