 So is your teenager's downloading habit funding incidents like 9/11? No. Not one bit. It doesn't mean you won't get a letter from RIAA demanding $300,000, but it's not funding terrorism. Unfortunately, the romanticism of this story is far more qualitative than the truth of it. In an effort to help quell piracy, all sorts of news agencies are releasing stories about US Attorney General Michael Mukasey claiming that the piracy which is going on all over the internet is funding terrorist activities. This is just not true at all, and you should pay no mind to it. Is it helping to pay for terrorist activities? Probably, but the question is what kind of piracy? Intellectual property theft covers everything that has a copyright or certain other types of licensing on it. This could be your car brakes, your clothing, your electronics, but it's probably least likely to be your digital media, for a number of reasons. The first reason is that people who steal digital media, meaning music, movies or software (most commonly), aren't paying anything for it. People who are grabbing applications and software programs that might legally cost hundreds or thousands of dollars are usually more tech savvy and if they're going to steal, they're going to go all the way and steal it online, not pay someone $50 for Adobe Photoshop on the street. Does it ever happen like this?
Sure it does. If you were the terrorist organization, though, would it be easier to make more money faster by selling bootleg CD's at $3-$5 each? Or would it make more sense to sell knock offs of designer clothing for $15-$150 at a shot? Most people who are pirating digital goods are doing so online and not paying anything, which keeps the market for that sort of business relatively small. It's much harder to download that Gucci handbag, no matter how big your new fiber connection. This may or may not be a ploy to extend, once again, the reach of the government. Mukasey is currently urging congress to adopt legislation “that would criminalize attempted copyright infringement, and add important investigative tools such as granting courts the authority to issue wiretap orders in criminal counterfeiting and piracy investigations." It might just be coincidence, but this certainly seems to serve the purpose of other people in other positions right now, both corporate and government, that have nothing to do with terrorism other than maybe tapping millions of phone lines and internet connections next time instead of just ten thousand. These stories, which seem to highlight cases like the one in which two Virginia brothers were found guilty of software piracy, are sorely lacking. The two brothers were never connected to any kind of terrorist activity, were more the exception than the rule (by a long shot) and it is unclear in the articles printed now as to whether or not the brothers made millions or just sold millions worth, as taken out of context these could be very different things.
The Attorney General also said he wanted to work more closely with countries that were “hacker havens." This, again, seems almost pointless. Instead, it would seem a more plausible goal to shift efforts towards tracking down the more tangible counterfeit goods. They have busted up rings of these people before, so they must have the resources. It seems redundant, but worth mentioning, that in the case where they brought down a ring of people producing counterfeit equipment from a well known networking company, they only said that the hardware's retail value was $76 million. Not how much they actually made. This is misleading in that it comes into the average person's mind as to how many bombs $76 million could buy, when in reality, it may only have been a few million dollars made, which then had to be dispersed between 5 or 6 people. At this point it is still a reality that some of that money could have gone into terrorist activity, but probably not more than a few hundred thousand dollars. The problem is that without the information, or with only one side of it, it is impossible to tell. There are also holes which leave us wondering such as the topics discussed in meetings between the AG and companies like Apple, Inc. and Adobe Systems, Inc, which were left out of the 20 minute speech that Mr. Mukasey gave at his conference, in which it's worth mentioning that he also took no questions. I would almost assume the Attorney General to be incapable of answering any question which required technical knowledge, although I would assume in the event of that there would be some kind of expert there to help field them. All in all, we need to remember that buying things which are stolen, whether it's the product or service itself or the intellectual property behind it, is illegal. We should never condone this kind of activity, nor should we turn a blind eye to it. If, however, the legal system in which we live, especially in the US is incapable of letting the entities which are victims handle things through the currently in place proper channels, then we must not rush into giving away more of our freedoms, but have an open forum in which people should voice their opinions based on experience and knowledge, not greed and power.
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