Does watching pirated movies make you a terrorist?

Davey Winder
Monday, 09 March 2009 10:09

IT Policy - Regulation

You might consider movie piracy a victimless crime, but some folk are now directly linking pirates to terrorists.

Microsoft reckons 60 percent of kids prefer it, the Brits want to tax it, and the world's largest BitTorrent tracker is currently telling the courts nothing can be done to stop it.

Researchers at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, are warning that movie piracy is not only illegal but dangerous as well. It is, according to a new report, linked to terrorism and organised crime funding.

The Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism report insists that organised crime syndicates are active throughout the piracy process from manufacture to sale, and the profits have been used to support terrorist activity.

Greg Treverton, who was lead author of the report and is Director of the Center for Global Risk and Security at RAND says of pirated movies that "...there is a good chance that at least part of the money will go to organized crime and those proceeds fund more-dangerous criminal activities, possibly terrorism."

Yet the same press release that contains the above quote also admits that "RAND researchers found no evidence terrorists are widely involved with film piracy" other than in three cases where terror groups are claimed to have benefitted from piracy derived funding.

These include the support of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) which, you might recall, officially ceased its armed campaign back in 2005. So let's call it two cases then: D-COmpany activity in India and donations from Assad Ahmad Barakat, who has been given global terrorist status by the US government, to Hezbolla.

Of course, while hyping up the terror risk and warning of the organised crime involvement, it is easy to forget the simple truth that increasingly much of the pirate activity is now being shifted to the Internet where file sharing generates income for nobody as a rule.

Yet even so, the report insists that movie piracy can be more profitable than drug trafficking with a profit margin up to three times higher than Iranian heroin and Columbian cocaine.

The RAND report says there is a need to produce stronger anti-counterfeiting laws, consistent enforcement against pirating and stronger penalties, including larger fines and prison sentences.

Ben Jones, writing at TorrentFreak, argues that "a large percentage of sources given in footnotes, happen to be the very groups that have funded the story, the MPA(A) and FACT, which should seriously dent the credibility of the report."