Chinese stage largest anti-piracy raid to date

Written by Clifford Coonan

Tuesday, 27 March 2007

Story Categories: China, Disney, DVD, Film, Hollywood In Asia, Piracy, Sony, Warner,

BEIJING -- Acting on intelligence from the Motion Picture Assn., Chinese antipiracy officials have staged their biggest raid this year, seizing 1.64 million illegal DVDs in a midnight strike in the southern city of Guangzhou.

Officers from China's National Anti-Piracy and Pornography Office and the Guangzhou Cultural Task Force, accompanied by an MPA rep, raided an optical disc manufacturing and storage facility in Guangzhou.

There they found 1.79 million optical discs, of which 1.64 million were believed to be illegal pirated copies of legitimate pics and shows, the MPA said on Monday.

The raid also yielded 30 machines used to erase Source Identification codes that allow investigators to determine the manufacturer of an optical disc. Officials detained two men believed to be managers of the facility and are extending their probe.

Mike Ellis, the MPA's senior veep and regional director for the Asia Pacific region, described the setup as a "significant operation."

"However, raids and seizures alone will not foster a vibrant film entertainment business in China unless the Chinese government aggressively targets intellectual property theft by opening its markets, implementing strict laws and sentencing guidelines and making clear to pirates and the population at large that it will not tolerate criminal behavior," he said.

The seized discs included pirated copies of dozens of MPA member-company films, as well as every Chinese movie released to date this year and many American, Korean and Japanese animation and TV skeins, the MPA said.

MPA member companies, which include Buena Vista Intl., Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal and Warner, lost $6.1 billion to worldwide piracy in 2005, according to a recent study.

Of that total around $2.4 billion was lost to bootlegging, $1.4 billion to illegal copying and $2.3 billion to Internet piracy.

The survey said around $1.2 billion of the lost revenue came from the Asia-Pacific region, while U.S. piracy accounted for $1.3 billion.

Last year, the MPA's Asia-Pacific ops investigated more than 30,000 cases of piracy and assisted law-enforcement officials in conducting nearly 12,400 raids.

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