Cengage Advantage Books: Foundations of the Legal Environment of Business 2nd Edition by Marianne Jennings, Albert Napier, Marianne Jennings

تمرين 10

Taliban Smuggles Sonys
When the Taliban was in power in Afghanistan, it banned watching television. The result of the ban was the creation of a substantial market for smuggling television sets into Afghanistan. For example, a Sony TV set smuggled into Pakistan would cost about $400. The legal cost, paying tariffs, would be $440. The same set smuggled into Afghanistan could bring twice as much. Sony gets the same, or $220, for every set sold, regardless of where it is sold and what happens to it in terms of its final destination.
The Taliban decided to impose tariffs and taxes on TV sets even as it held to the ban because the ban produced the smuggling market from which they could extract substantial sums.
Do you think Sony had an ethical obligation not to sell to the Taliban? Does Sony have an ethical obligation to police what happens to its products? What happens when a company profits from a government making money from its own ban?
Source: Daniel Pearl and Steve Stecklow, "Taliban Banned TV But Collected Profits on Smuggled Sonys," Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2002, pp. A1, A8. (Note that the source for this article was a story coau-thored by Daniel Pearl, the U.S. journalist who was kidnapped and eventually killed by terrorists, with graphic coverage of the execution.)