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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.
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.
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
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
No, that's a blatant misrepresentation. Read this story:
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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