When the head of a major international organization sounds like someone from the radical fringe, you know the debate over copyright has intensified to a dangerous level. The speaker in this case is Lamil Idris, director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). "Piracy is like terrorism today," he says. "It exists everywhere and it is a very dangerous phenomenon." Idris as describes how he "had heard of children dying after using counterfeit baby shampoo" - yet there is utterly no evidence of such a thing happening ("counterfeit shampoo sometimes contains bacteria and has caused hair loss"). This is pure fabricated fear-mongering, and the director of WIPO ought to know better. More worrisome, though, about the link between piracy and terrorism is that the measures used to combat terrorism - arbitrary arrest, detention without trial - ought to be used against file sharers. How else would one read a statement like this: "enforcement, the way we want it, still has a long way to go." Dangerous and outrageous. Perhaps it's time for a change of management at WIPO.
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