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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