Are OC and ‘piracy’ connected?
p2pnet.net News:- In much the same way that they try to disingenuously tie file sharers in with criminal counterfeiters, the entertainment and software cartels also claim copyright infringement has a major place in the world of The Sopranos in other words, with Organized Crime.
“The practice and trade of music piracy have become more sophisticated, cunning and connected to organized crime, the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) Brad Buckles claimed recently. “CD-R reproduction in the eastern half of the United States is now dominated by organized criminal syndicates intent on monopolizing the illicit market share by operating on high volume and very low profit margins,” he stated unequivocally.
This kind of extremely dubious contention is undoubtedly one of the ways the Organized Entertainment Cartels are able to talk police services into chasing after counterfeit CDs on behalf of their members, the Big Four record labels, major movie studios and software companies, instead of undertaking legitimate policing activities.
“Organized crime’s entree into the content business was inevitable given the economics,” Wired News has Warner Music spokesman Craig Hoffman saying. “The markup for a kilo of heroin is 200 percent,” Hoffman says. “The markup for pirated CDs and DVDs is 800 percent.”
So now the Big Music cartel, whose members take a Mafia-like approach with their sue ‘em all victims, making them offers they can’t refuse, and who have indisputably been enaged in bribery and other kinds of corruption, are trying to link fake CDs to drug dealing.
The studios are in on it as well. “The business model is similar to dealing drugs,” Wired quotes MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America) mouthpiece Chuck Hausman as saying.
However, “The problem is that the evidence – so far, at least – is lacking,” says Wired, going on:
“Asked to cite actual U.S. convictions involving organized crime, the RIAA and MPAA instead presented a handful of pending piracy cases against warez networks, commercial replicators, a few members of street gangs and a smattering of individual drug dealers – but no John Gotti or Tony Soprano.
“It’s not organized crime families, as in ‘the mob’,” the story gets Buckles to admit. “But large groups engaged in organized criminal activity are involved.”
“In San Antonio in early July, police arrested repeat offender Michael Portillo for piracy and found 47 burners, two unloaded handguns, two loaded automatic weapons, a bulletproof vest, some methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and marijuana,” says Wired. “Two other men on the scene were arrested on drug-related charges.”
But, “do a handful of piracy cases with violent suspects add up to organized crime?” asks the story. “Skeptics say no.
“A few gang members get arrested and all of the sudden there are reports that gangs are pigeonholed as being big into piracy,” it has Alejandro Alfonso, “who routinely testifies as an expert witness on Los Angeles gangs,” saying. “But if anything, it’s small-scale stuff…. Gangs might be involved on the fringes.”
And, “In the U.S., piracy tends to be small-time players,” says Mike Goodman, a senior analyst at the Yankee Group. “I’ve not seen any cases of organized crime…. It’s four, five, six guys who (burn discs and) sell them on the street.”
For now, “no convictions have been made, and neither the industry associations nor police are able to provide convincing detail, something they attribute to the early stage of their investigations,” says the story.
The entertainment cartels routinely use tax-payer funded government agencies on purely corporate business. The RIAA does it all the time and the MPAA is able to easily tap LA DA office.
By way of example, “To doubters, MPAA’s Hausman and the Los Angeles district attorney’s office say stay tuned,” concludes the Wired story:
“Several large-scale, for-profit piracy operations are currently under investigation. ‘There are a number of pending piracy cases I can’t talk about,’ says Jeff McGrath, district attorney at the high-tech crimes unit in Los Angeles.”
Indeed, stay tuned.
If there’s something you think we should know, contact us – tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
RIAA – RIAA`s Annual Commercial Piracy Report Shows Trafficking In Pirated Music Increasingly Sophisticated, Closer Ties To Criminal Syndicates, July 13, 2005
Wired News – Mob Pirates: Menace or Myth?, August 19, 2005
Mafia-like – File sharing, p2p criminals, March 12, 2005
bribery – Spitzer on Sony BMG scandal, July 20, 2005
corruption – Big Music vs Eliot Spitzer, October 22, 2004
August 19th, 2005 at 7:24 pm
There has been a spate of south east asian looking guys lurking round my local area recently, selling bootleg cd’s and dvd’s… perhaps it’s not the mafia after all but rather the triads who are cornering the illicit cd market!
After all they have better access to far eastern sources with bootleg silvers of unreleased movies. I’m telling you man, forget the mafia, it’s those triads you need to look out for.
August 19th, 2005 at 7:34 pm
The bigger question: is “The O.C.” connected to piracy?
August 19th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
If by organized crime, you mean feeling at the end of a gun, I would think that the organized crime comes from sold music on line. Where else can you pay such an outrageous sum for 1’s and 0’s and still come away robbed?
Where you wanna start first? Cost? Ok. There is no basic difference in cost for buying on line than there is for buying the physical cd. Despite the fact that there is no packaging nor is there any manufacturing costs, those are still included in the price. Artwork is almost non-existant and when it is there it is so small as to be next to worthless. Yet you are still charged as if you recieved the full cover size edition when it is present. The idea that music costs 99¢ seems to be a universal price (unless renting it). Funny that foreign businesses can come up with the cost of music being precisely the same, in different counties, despite the current economic conditions varying in each country. The question begs to be asked, “How much of that 99¢ went towards payolla?” Will we be seeing a refund on past paid payolla or will there be a price decrease now that it isn’t in use (once again)? Somehow I think we know the answer to that one.
Well, enough hitting the high spots… how about product? Ok, Where can you go to buy 128 bitrate which in a physical cd would be laughable as such low quality? Even the music industry recognises this indirectly. You always see “near cd quality”. I beg to differ but 128 bit rate is no where near cd quality. Get on up in the thousands if you want to get near cd quality. Then there is the anticopy, which has been a reported problem constantly by the buyers of such a product. Reports of fail to play cds in existing players, even a case for selling subpar goods where as usual no where on the case of the product does it mention the anticopy being included, nor even what type so that one might judge if might play or not depending on the method used. Mysteriously the cartels don’t even want to talk about that. However Sony has told the rest of them that one of the latest can not bear the cd icon on the case. It doesn’t meet the Red Book standards for a cd. The idea is that you will play it fine in your home player but if it is on a computer then there is a failed read causing the drive to spin ever faster with the potential to tear up the drive due to excessive rpms. Well how about interoperability? Your product, you paid and bought it, so why can’t you use it in the iPod, or mp3 player of your choice? Oh, we forgot, they want you to pay again for that little idea.
These could go on and on and I have not the space here to just continue on listing all the little fallacies. To add to all this is the idea that the cartels themselves are acting like Organize Crime. Basically in the name of profit, they are willing to mugg teens, grandmas, and dead citizens. I don’t know about you but it does nothing for their self image in my book. I don’t want to be associated with such actions as they are closer to crimes against humanity when you look at some of the busts that have occured where the RIAA was the tipster of the day or closely involved in any sort of setup to catch true counterfitters. So what sort of treatment you suppose average Joes gonna get in dealing with downloading? All it takes is a bad number or a misreading of the ip and it might be your door that is being broken down. Think about it.
August 19th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
Of course OC and “piracy” are connected have been for years, only thing is they are on the INSIDE. This is just the tip of the iceberg. If we can everget an investigation into record labels “The Mob” would be green with envy. It would make Enron look like kids stuff.
Required reading:
Hit Men–Fredric Dannen
Stiffed: A True Story of McA, the Music Business, and the Mafia – William Knoedelseder
http://www.moldea.com/MCAMusic.html
May 29, 1973 in History
Event:
Columbia Records fires president Clive Davis for misappropriating $100,000 in funds, Davis will start Arista records
August 20th, 2005 at 4:08 am
No, piracy is cool & “The OC” sucks! LOL.
August 20th, 2005 at 11:51 am
Certainly. You can find both series on Bittorrent.
August 23rd, 2005 at 5:22 am
What kind of drugs are you on ?
The next thing you are going to tell me that the mafia does not have any influence in los vegas or jersey city.
Anything to make make money.
Loan sharking horse bets prostitution numbers rackets murder for hire ………….
you name it.
Do You ever wonder why the mpaa would not even attempt their normal gestapo contraband raids on a suspected dvd or cd factory that is run by the mob ?
The laughable Mpaa uniformed storm trooper with the mpaa logo?
They would either get taken into a dark room much like jimmy hoffa and take a .44 magnum slug in their heads and/or get cut up into little peices and get thrown in a garbage dumpster.
Chinese crime tongs (triads ) and the russian mafia also deal in contraband dvds and cds and they are even MORE VICIOUS………….
BELIEVE ME IT’S MUCH EASIER SUING PEOPLE.