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.

Comments

me thinks that RAND doth protest too much.

[senorpoco]

Download Torrents, stamp out terrorism.

Re:me thinks that RAND doth protest too much.

[peragrin]

exactly. if you pirate movies are music make sure you get the online free version instead of the half price fake cd/dvd version.

In fact Organized crime would most likely love to have online P2P stopped. their low prices can't beat free.

Re:me thinks that RAND doth protest too much.

[mdwh2]

Indeed - by this reasoning, the Government should be promoting, and certainly not opposing, free downloading, as part of its War On Terrorrr. Surely, the threat of terrorism is far more serious than any alleged loss of a few sales? "If it saves just one life" etc :)

Only one solution then...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

oblig

[gEvil (beta)]

Anyone have a torrent of the video version?

Organised crime link probably true

[wvmarle]

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.

Fight Terrorism

[sjames]

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!

Re:me thinks that RAND don't protest too much.

[Z00L00K]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Then again

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

speaking of interchangeble terms

[Scrameustache]

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!

Re:speaking of interchangeble terms

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

I thought the MPAA was organized crime...

Re:speaking of interchangeble terms

[Anonymous Coward]

Whooosh!

Re:speaking of interchangeble terms

[MrNaz]

No, the MPAA are a bunch of thugs.

RAND corporation, however, a sickening organization that profiteers by preparing "research papers" that deliberately misrepresents facts for the purpose of twisting social and economic policy to serve the agendas of big lobby groups, is the worst kind of organized crime; the kind that has government backing.

Re:me thinks that RAND don't protest too much.

[Knuckles]

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,

U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.

. -- 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,

Illicit opium production, now dominated by Afghanistan, was decimated in 2000 when production was banned by the Taliban, but has increased steadily since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and over the course of the War in Afghanistan

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium (follow the references)

Last year 80% of the world's opium came from Afghanistan and production is up over 239% since 2003, according to U.S. government estimates.

-- http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/2005_Afghan_opium_harvest_begins

Re:me thinks that RAND don't protest too much.

[Hatta]

Blatant misrepresentation. By 2000 the Taliban had banned opium production and by 2001,

No, that's a blatant misrepresentation. Read this story:

Opium cultivation increased significantly each year under Taliban rule until they issued decrees in July 2000 banning poppy cultivation. The ban became effective after that year's crop was safely harvested. The Taliban took no steps to apprehend drug traffickers or seize stored opium, precursor chemicals, morphine, or heroin. Instead, the Taliban were selling their own opium at newly inflated prices and allowed others to sell, process, and transport drugs, with the Taliban taking their usual fees in taxes and protection money.

The ban that eliminated the 2001 crop had nothing to do with curtailing the drug trade. Heroin labs remained active and shipments and seizures of heroin coming out of Afghanistan actually increased compared to the year before the ban, although some of those shipments came from areas controlled by the Northern Alliance, who were also deeply involved in poppy cultivation.

The United States Drug Enforcement Administration said the ban was probably an attempt to increase the price of opium, which declined following a series of bumper crops. The Taliban also hoped to gain international recognition of their government beyond Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Follow the money.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.