Wednesday, 6 June 2018

Analyzing Organized Crime:2


Entertainment piracy: fair game, or organized crime?
This month, the acclaimed HBO TV Show Game of Thrones broke online piracy records with one million illegal downloads in just half a day.
Online pirating in the entertainment industry is said to cost the US economy more than $12.5 billion dollars a year. Almost a quarter of all internet traffic (excluding pornography) is estimated to be infringing copyright, according to a report commissioned by media and entertainment company NBC Universal.
And this is a truly global phenomenon.
In the upcoming Broadcast Film and Music Africa conference, to be held in May, piracy, broadcasting rights, licensing and legal framework development are some of the hot topics to be discussed, as there is little culture or capacity for regulation of the industry. It is estimated that legitimate content accounts for less than 10 % of the music market in many African nations. With numbers like this, it makes it almost impossible to maintain the African entertainment industry as a profitable enterprise, thereby reducing the capacity of the creative economy to be a true driver for development.
But while online piracy is clearly a drain on the legitimate economy and on entertainment entrepreneurship, is it an organized crime?
The majority of online content theft is done through peer-to-peer (P2P) file sites such as BitTorrent, which allow individual users to share content. Music sales in the United States dropped 47 percent in the decade since P2P file sharing site Napster was created in 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. P2P is not itself illegal, and neither are the companies that provide the file-sharing platforms. Since the infamous Napster, the companies providing P2P services are held not liable for the actions of their clients.
With the companies absolved, the pirate then becomes the individual who shares files in a way that infringes the permissions granted by the copyright holder. The criminality of infringement of copyright - even on the mass scale that is now undertaken - is still not organized crime.
The greatest danger from online piracy is from the almost lackadaisical legitimacy it appears to have. A survey in Brazil found 59% of respondents did not consider downloading copyright material a crime. A Danish survey found 70% of people felt there was nothing wrong with illegal downloads. A recent study showed that piracy websites are even now attracting such legitimacy as to garner advertising revenue, at the scale of more than $220 million a year. In March this year, the premier photostock company, Getty Images, found theft of its images to be so widespread, it essentially gave up the fight and made 35 million images from its extensive library free for use.
Because of its low social stigma, piracy and counterfeiting are often considered a low priority for law enforcement. But the crime is both serious, violent and arguably becomes “organized”, with the vast criminal market for the onward selling of pirated products for profit.
Concerns of connections between media piracy and narco-trafficking, arms smuggling, and other “hard” forms of organized crime have been part of enforcement discourse since the late 1990s, when the International Foundation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) began to raise concerns about the transborder smuggling of pirated CDs (IFPI 2001). It estimated that criminal groups were earning between $4-5 billion from the sale of counterfeit CDs, an extraordinarily large amount at the time.
In 2009, the Rand Corporation published a comprehensive report examining the connections between piracy, organized crime and terrorism, which found provided compelling evidence of a broad, geographically dispersed, and continuing connection between film piracy and organized crime, as well as evidence that terrorist groups such as Hezbollah have used the proceeds of film piracy to finance their activities. More recent investigations in Brazil have shown a clear link between the criminal groups trafficking drugs or smuggling weapons, and those behind entertainment piracy. The Brazilian case in fact described entertainment piracy as the “Plan B” of organized crime, used to bolster profits, buy weapons and expand operations.
Organized crime groups derive great benefit from piracy and counterfeiting of goods, and it is, in fact, one of the highest drivers of criminal profits. The Rand Corporation study showed that the margin on piracy is far higher than that on drug trafficking, and that online piracy operations can be completely controlled from source to end by criminal groups.
Criminal groups, are dangerous, violent and damage human security, economic development and stability. Whatever helps them to thrive, should be taken seriously.

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