Although it appears to be apocryphal, I’ve always loved the quote attributed to Willie Sutton that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” That’s a perfectly logical approach to crime, right? You don’t go where the money isn’t. So it should be no surprise that if you purchase i pirated film, there is a high likelihood that at some point the video passed through the hands of organized crime. That must be true for other creative works as well, such as recorded music and video games. That especially seems true when you look at the level of enforcement given to creative work infringement vs. other crimes.

I have been to numerous hearings on Capitol Hill where law enforcement officials from various agencies have shown links between commercial piracy and organized crime, yet there has always been some skepticism about how extensive it is, because evidence has been largely anecdotal. Now, however, the highly respected RAND Corporation has published a research work titled “Film Piracy and Its Connection to Organized Crime and Terrorism.” They use hard evidence such as court records to document in overwhelming detail seventeen case studies of organized crime groups and their involvements not just in film piracy and counterfeiting but other crimes such as money laundering, illegal gambling, racketeering, loan-sharking, prostitution, forgery services, weapons trafficking, contact killing, and human smuggling. Ouch.

RAND says they based these case studies on more than 2,000 pages of primary source materials and 120 interviews with law enforcement. In some cases, criminal groups gained control of the entire counterfeiting supply chain, from manufacturing to distribution to direct sales to consumers.

The report cites three of the seventeen crime groups — the Barakat Network, Provisional Irish Republican Army, and D-Company — as using revenues from piracy and other crimes to fund terrorist operations such as Hezbollah. This isn’t good. But RAND is less aggressive in drawing this link, leaning more toward the argument that you can’t rule out that the pirated work was involved in funding terrorism, as opposed to the other argument that there is a high likelihood it passed through organized crime at some point. The bottom line is this — I don’t put a human smuggler or a contract killer on a higher moral plane than a terrorist.

Some will say there is a difference between commercial piracy and file-sharing (although the P2P providers are certainly commercial), and I sometimes hear Free Culture supporters say they are okay with enforcement against physical piracy but view online infringement differently. (A few celebrate all piracy, and they unfortunately besmirch those defending only online infringement.)

Sometimes the distinction is made that it’s okay to stop unauthorized reproduction of a physical work, but it’s okay to reproduce a digital work. This is odd logic, of course; under copyright law the work is in a fixed state regardless, and the time and effort the artist(s) put into creating the work varies not a whit in what form the work is distributed.

Sometimes the distinction is made that profiting from piracy is bad, but merely sharing creative works with others (even thousands of strangers) is just doing what digital technology is capable of doing. It’s capable of sending spam, viruses and child pornography, too. But the key point here is that there is an economic loss to the creator either way. If someone buys a pirate DVD or downloads the movie through BitTorrent, they have the movie without compensation to the creator either way. Is every theft a lost sale? No, but you can’t with a straight face argue there are no lost sales, either, and there is no reason to believe that there is a significant difference between the two forms of piracy in terms of sale replacement.

I don’t expect readers to agree with everything I write; is there any opinion writer out there that you agree with every time? But hopefully my readers will examine the RAND study, knowing full well that their research staff is top-drawer, has no interest in undermining its reputation, and has done an exhaustive investigation that solidly and directly finds numerous links between organized crime and film piracy. I’d like to think we can all agree that it’s best not to support organized crime.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 10:00 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, copyright opponents, counterfeit, creators, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.