Police Payoff Probe
Found on New York Post on Friday, 22 April 2005
Two NYPD veterans are being investigated by Internal Affairs for allegedly accepting payoffs from the motion-picture industry to arrest vendors of pirated DVDs, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
Often they would act on tips from investigators with the Motion Picture Association of America, many of whom are former cops, sources said.
There is nothing improper about that practice. But on at least four occasions in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island, the task force officers arrested the vendors, confiscated the illegal movies and then allegedly received gratuities of several hundred dollars from the MPAA itself or its investigators, the source said.
I'm not defending the sale of pirated DVDs, but I'm sure the industry will simply mix up this kind of piracy with normal P2P. If somebody actually wants to buy a movie, he should get an official version. The interesting point however is how the movie industry is trying to achieve its goals. Paying officers, using incorrect sales numbers, trying to make their own laws, faking evidence (like in Sweden, when they raided Bahnhof). Then this malware appeared yesterday which deletes all MP3's from a user's computer. There might have been some credibility if they wouldn't have lied from the start; but now, who would trust them?