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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.
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.
They're both based on "intellectual property". So they're gambling that laws protecting "IP" will be good for them.
Anyone have a torrent of the video version?
This guy's the limit!
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.
Which you surely put in quotes for a reason (as in the words of Richard M. Stallman):
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!
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Bringing down western civilization by downloading episodes of Battlestar Galactica instead of paying for cable.
Thank you MPA for saving the day!
There is a fundamental difference between economic and non-economic piracy.
Yes, economic pirates go for the galleons and merchantmen as well as plundering small, poorly defended towns; whereas non-economic pirates attack frigates and other warships, however these are usually referred to as privateers.
Oh wait, what were we talking about?
Copyright infringement is not the same as "piracy". No one dies. No ships get sunk. And nothing gets STOLEN. Copyrighted works get digitally copied, though.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
they could fund terrorism. Or alcoholism, or about anything else.
Even politicians? I know, I know - I'm going to far. Surely no one could be THAT terrible.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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...
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.
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.
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
The biggest takeaway I get from this report is that you can never be certain physical media isn't counterfeit, so the only way to make certain you aren't financing criminals is to get all your music and video via P2P. But then, I'm only about the 100th person on here to say that. The MPAA fails to distinguish between unauthorized distribution of free copies and sales of counterfeit media in it's propaganda, referring to both by the inaccurate pejorative "piracy". Even if the study is valid, the MPAA's use of it to back up their misleading claims is highly suspect.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
RAND is not going to sell out just because one study was funded by the MPAA
I don't think it would be possible for RAND to sell out. That would imply that they had some objectivity or integrity to start with. I find RAND a good filter word. Just as when someone says 'beowulf' it's a sure sign that they don't know anything about cluster computing, when someone quotes a RAND report (or, worse, puts 'RAND Fellow' on their business card) it's fairly safe to assume that they don't have the faintest clue about economics.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 hate to break it to you, but sex isn't illegal. Those women have just been trying not to hurt your feelings.
Blank until
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!
So... what you're saying is that P2P aka non-commercial copyright infringement is not piracy, it's privateering?
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.
And yet, bootleg DVDs are everywhere. Probably because most of them originate from China where you're far more likely to be punished for littering than for bootlegging hollywood movies. In such an operation, the fact that you're shipping a ophysical product is a plus since it explains where all that cash is coming from. It looks legitimate so long as law enforcement doesn't actually inspect the product you ship too closely. Meanwhile, inspecting things carefully involves actual work and illegal drugs are much easier to inspect and are a much higher profile bust...
Put another way, find a kilo of illegal drugs and it makes the news. You get a good entry in your file. Keep it up and your promotion is on the fast track. Find a few crates of bootlegged "Lion King" and your superiors say "good work" while yawning.
So you get a profit margin of 500-800 percent, police don't really care, no three strikes laws for peddling bootleg DVDs, all of your production looks legitimate on the surface, etc.
That veneer of legitimacy makes for a lot more plausible deniability.
You have obviously never spent time on W 25th St in Manhattan.
No, that's a blatant misrepresentation. Read this story:
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
... 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I used the money I got from burning rips to DVD to fund a RAND research paper linking terrorism and pirating CDs/DVDs.
greed@All_Evils:~#
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
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