p2pnet - rss feed: Hollywood cops rampage
p2pnet.net News:- “At 5 a.m. the police kicked in the front door of the modest apartment house in working-class Essen. Guns drawn, they ordered an unsuspecting family out of bed. A few minutes later, they hauled away a 22-year-old college student as his stunned parents looked on in silence.”
And ……
“[…] the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black ‘raid’ vests the unit members wore.”
The first quote is from a Boston Globe story here on a raid in Germany and it goes on, “This wasn’t a scene from a big-screen police thriller. But it had Hollywood’s fingerprints all over it.”
The second comes from a LA Weekly story here which continues, “The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read ‘RIAA’ instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo. The Recording Industry Association of America is taking it to the streets. Even as it suffers setbacks in the courtroom, the RIAA has over the last 18 months built up a national staff of ex-cops to crack down on people making and selling illegal CDs in the hood.”
Hollywood Rulz - everywhere
Hollywood - the catch-all for the entertainment industry in all its shapes and guises and its many and various ‘trade’ organizations - routinely uses genuine international police and enforcement agencies as unpaid police labour, backed up by fake movie and record industry cops who do their best to look and act like real thing.
It goes on all over the world from Asia to Australia to the US of A, and all parts in between. It’s an appalling reality. But: there’s never so much as a murmur from the administrations in the countries involved, or from the taxpayers whose money pays for the police forces suborned by the entertainment industry.
It’s the way Hollywood makes absolutely sure that its movie and music enterprises remain the multi-billion-dollar industries that they are today, their statements to the contrary notwithstanding.
Using the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and RIAA and other alphabet organizations around the world such as the IFPI and BPI as its fronts, Hollywood does more or less what it wants everywhere.
The German incident was came about through the efforts of the German Anti-Piracy Federation, “a private investigating organization funded by US studios, German independent film companies, and electronics firms worked with law enforcement to stage the March raid on 800 locations across Germany,” says the Globe story. “In all, 12 people were arrested.
“This was our D-day,” the Boston Globe quotes federation managing director Jochen Tielke as boasting, and goes on:
“The studios worry that as technology improves, Internet piracy will decimate the movie business as it has the music industry. And so they are aggressively combating piracy worldwide by hiring copyright lawyers, filing civil lawsuits, and exerting political pressure on foreign governments through the US government and the studios’ trade organization, the Motion Picture Association of America.
“In all, the MPAA has helped bankroll 57 antipiracy organizations around the world that are doing the investigative legwork most law-enforcement agencies consider too low a priority to pursue on their own. The MPAA will not divulge the size of its investment in the groups.”
In reality, there is no ‘investmen’t and far from being decimated, the record business is booming.
The entertainment industry owns and funds it all. It tells the groups what to do, and when to do it. And through these ‘trade’ organs and through high-echelon supporters around the world, backed by minions working in the shadows, persuades, cajols, bribes, schmoozes people in publicly funded organizations and administrations into doing its dirty work.
It also controls the mainstream media so its message is the one that’s heard most loudly and most often.
Undercover investigators
“In Germany, as in other countries, the campaign goes beyond bringing down high-tech pirates,” says the Globe.
“Undercover investigators from the German antipiracy unit visit local flea markets nearly every weekend. On a Saturday in May at a bustling flea market in Essen, scores of young men and women with briefcases full of illegal movies sold their wares for about $6. It’s become a cat-and-mouse game: Lookouts at the flea-market entrance spot an investigator or cop, tip the vendors with a cellphone call, and the sellers pack up their booty and disappear.
“At the flea markets, the pirates tend to traffic in Hollywood fare. But German independent filmmakers say piracy is affecting their business even more profoundly.
“It’s a disaster,” Stefan Arndt, producer of ‘Goodbye Lenin,’ the country’s biggest hit last year, is quoted as saying.
“What is going to happen is that independent films like this will disappear, and in the end all you are going to get are more ‘Harry Potters’ and more ‘Lord of the Rings.’ ”
But it’s not only Germany. “Mexican police were involved in violent clashes with criminal gangs in Mexico City’s notorious Tepito market in a raid which netted hundreds of thousands of discs and equipment along with firearms and illegal drugs,” brags Hollywood’s IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industries).
And in Peru, “A huge seizure … involving 1,000 police officers netted no fewer than 1 million burned CD-R discs in the famous ‘Hueco’ flea market. During the operation over 400 stands were raided and 10 people were arrested.”
But Hollywood’s bottom line is its achilles heel.
The record industry is far from being in dire straits, as it claims, but thanks to the advent of the Net and through it, p2p and other forms of instant communication, for the first time in its history, it’s lost control over the people who make up what used to be called its ‘consumer bases’. In the 21st century, ‘consumers’ are well on their way to forcing Big Music to dance to their tunes.
And the same thing is happening to the movie studios.
In the last century, the entertainment industry way was the only way.
But this is the 21st century - the digital age.
More to come, as they say …..
August 9th, 2004 at 6:48 pm
I _would_ do whatever the police say.
But if some idiots dressed up as commandos and broke into my house with guns drawn, and the letters DIDN’T say “FBI/DEA/LAPD/AFT” and they did not identify themselves as such, then I think I would HAVE to shoot them to protect myself in my own home.
I have no idea how that would hold up in court (and only because I am sure there were police babysitting these punks) but at least my court and sentencing would be real, instead of over some B.s. like “pirating”.
August 10th, 2004 at 5:00 am
Are Riaa agents even reguarded as anything more than a joke!!!!! What gives them the right to hassle people?????? On the scale of law enforcement these guys don’t even measure up to a rent a cop!!!!!!!
August 10th, 2004 at 5:39 am
When these terribly misquided people come up maimed,cut up, or get shot to death by the violence they would incur if they dealt with real criminial types they will quit.
A bootleg cd or dvd is not worth getting hacked into little pieces and stuffed into a body bag.
Real criminial types who are into illegal pirating and into drug trafficing could’nt care less about killing real cops let alone a mighty big dickhead trying to be real one.
This is fucking insane!!