[Infowarrior] - Who's Funding More Terrorism: Downloaders Or Hollywood?

[Richard Forno]

Who's Funding More Terrorism: Downloaders Or Hollywood?

from the questions-to-ask dept

We've written a few times now about the absolutely brilliant SSRC report on media "piracy," and how it's basically a business model problem, rather than a legal one. The report is thorough, detailed and rather complete on a variety of topics related to this issue. And while we might hope that such a fantastic piece of scholarly research could take certain silly arguments off the table, apparently that's wishful thinking. The main guy behind the report, Joe Karaganis, has recently posted some blog posts on the whole "terrorism" issue. You see, it's quite common for people pushing for greater copyright enforcement to make the claim that infringement funds terrorism and organized crime. We've attempted to debunk some of those claims in the past, but the SSRC folks did an amazingly thorough debunking (pdf) of the whole thing. Basically, it argues that, pre-internet, there was likely a connection between counterfeiting CDs/DVDs and organized crime, but that business has pretty much dried up thanks to the internet. So the claims of infringement funding such things is really lacking. A snippet:

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http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110421/00493313981/whos-funding-more-terrorism-downloaders-hollywood.shtml