'Film piracy and terrorism are interlinked'
'Film piracy and terrorism are interlinked'
New Delhi: An international study, conducted by a division of the US-based RAND Corporation and backed by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), has established strong links between film/music piracy and terrorism.
The trail of film piracy leads to terrorism, the report says, citing three case studies. Dawood Ibrahim's D-Company is one of the examples in the study.
Since the 1980s, Ibrahim and his gang have been able to vertically integrate D-Company throughout the Indian film and pirate industry, "forging a clear pirate monopoly over competitors and launching a racket to control the master copies of pirated Bollywood and Hollywood films."
The report adds that D-Company was transformed into a terrorist organisation when it carried out the 'Black Friday' Mumbai bombings in 1993.
The case shows how a crime group that turned into a terrorist outfit, leveraged rackets in the film industry to vertically expand into piracy. Although the group's proceeds from film piracy are not known, it would have been a highly profitable enterprise going by the size and sophistication of its counterfeit DVD operation.
"Once D-Company's control of the production, distribution and manufacturing/piracy operations was in place, the gang was able to launch a racket to control the masters of most Bollywood and dubbed Hollywood films distributed in India," according to the report.
The other two case studies in the report are those of the Barakat network's involvement in piracy in Latin America, and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland.
The report states that in all these cases, "piracy dovetailed with extortion, providing the pirates protected spaces in which to manufacture and sell their merchandise with little competition."
As per estimates, trade in counterfeit goods has grown eight times faster than legitimate trade since the early 1990s. The US Trade Representative estimated losses between $200 billion and $250 billion per year from piracy and counterfeiting of products.
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