MPAA Study Calls For Piracy Patriot Act

A new study produced by RAND links the film piracy trade to terrorism, drug cartels, and human trafficking, and calls upon governments to do more about intellectual property protection. But what it really is is another attempt to convince governments to spy on everybody on behalf of one mafia trying to muscle out other mafias.

For the most part, the study is fairly typical fear mongering, the kind used to justify calls for ISPs to police traffic on their networks on behalf of the government and entertainment companies. It goes a little farther than that, however, in that it directly calls for governments to share intelligence with entertainment companies in order to help them police piracy networks. The authors call on governments to have a “commitment to high level accountability for intellectual property protections” and “laws to grant investigators greater authority to sustain investigations, conduct surveillance, and obtain search warrants.”

In short, the study calls for a Patriot Act for the Entertainment Industry.

Studies like this in the past, including one from the MPAA that was outed for