organised crime | writing notes

Copyright violation has been linked to terrorism before and it was a stupid then as it is now. Can you imagine terrorists sitting in caves in Afghanistan downloading stuff from the Pirate Bay to destroy western civilization? This is such far fetched propaganda that it should just be seen as excellent comedy – if it wasn’t being proposed by “serious” people and will eventually believed by people in power. Scary.

From Infocult:

Linking copyright violation and terrorism is back. “Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism” (pdf) starts by linking pirates and gangsters, claiming to have found:

compelling evidence of a broad, geographically dispersed, and continuing connection between film piracy and organized crime.

The Rand study goes on to leap onto terrorism:

Moreover, three of the documented cases provide clear evidence that terrorist groups have used the proceeds of film piracy to finance their activities.

Torrentfreak does a good job of taking this apart. One key piece: the study explicitly conflates counterfeiting and copyright infringement. Also important is the loose linkage between different people, functions, and crimes.

Recently I bought the a box collection of BBC comedy The Vicar of Dibley after enjoying the content I did not turn off the DVD in time and I caught the advert against piracy which included the amazing news that “piracy supports organized crime” and “piracy supports terrorism”

This type of false propaganda annoys me on several levels. So ok I can accept that there may be a link between organized crime and piracy but terrorism???

So what between planning to fly an airplane into a building and bombing innocent civilians, terrorists sitting in caves mass pirate dvds and upload films on the Internet? What a load of bull!

Actually another thing that annoys me about dvd’s is the compulsory and very annoying copyright and piracy infomercials in the begining. It almost makes you want to be a pirate – at least they cut away that crap. If I buy a dvd I actually think it should be my right to be able to jump past the annoying useless stuff in the begining.