Piracy more dangerous than bank robbing

NBC'S top lawyer, Rick Cotton, has said that too much money was spent defending society from bank robbers, fraud and burglary.

Cotton said that policing money should be spent doing more about piracy instead.

He said that law enforcement resources were "seriously misaligned". If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, it only costs the country $16 billion a year.

Intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Ignoring the "hundreds of billions of dollars" myth about piracy, the most inflated figure touted by the MPAA has been $6 billion a year, Cotton seems to stating that crimes against society are less important than crimes against Movie studios.

What is even scarier, if you live in the US, is that Cotton and his Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy want to change federal law enforcement emphasis so that intellectual property crimes are given priority over other kinds of crime.

They are spending a fortune lobbying their tame politicians to do just that. We wonder if Cotton will change his mind while he is looking down the barrel of a shotgun during a bank heist, which has been made easier because local cops have been busy tracking down someone was downloading a copy of Spiderman 3. µ

L'INQ
Ars Technica