On February 15, the film industry, the movie business, video game publishers, and business software developers submitted a massive report to the US government, as they do every year. That report, part of America's "Special 301" process, is a key tool used each year to develop a list of other countries that the US wants to pressure on intellectual property laws. This year's version alleged that piracy is now, in many countries, a product of organized crime (PDF). And it claimed that pirated DVDs are worth more than cocaine.
Such claims have been made many times over the last decade, but a major new report, funded by Canada and by the Ford Foundation and buttressed by fieldwork around the globe, suggests that neither assertion is true. Indeed, far from being supremely lucrative, commercial piracy is under pressure from the same force pressing on legal distribution: free Internet file-sharing.
As for the drugs... well, there's a reason the gangs in The Wire weren't selling bootlegs of Spider-Man 3. There's just not much money in it anymore.
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Ananda Lewis Kate Bosworth Tamala Jones Yamila Diaz Alicia Keys
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