James Delahunty
7 Dec 2004 14:31
In the Asia-Pacific, piracy has become big business. The Motion Pictures Association (MPA) estimated that every year, the U.S. movie industry loses around $718m in potential revenue. It blames the growth of criminal activity, the increasingly easy ways to copy optical discs illegally and the growth of ultra high speed Internet connections and the numbers of P2P networks that keep popping up on a daily basis. These factors have turned piracy in the Asia-Pacific into a multi million dollar market. In the past, piracy on this scale came usually from factories pirating thousands of CD's and DVD's. Now it gets harder as these factories have been replaced by numbers of individuals pirating material in their homes and selling the DVD's and CD's to the re-sellers.
This new form of mass piracy has made it harder to crack down on. The MPA investigated 10,660 cases of piracy in the first half of 2004 and also assisted law enforcement in over 4000 raids in the Asia-Pacific region. 11.8m illegal optical discs were seized and 2000 criminal legal actions were initiated. The top three Asia-Pacific markets for seizures of pirated VCD and DVD product were mainland China, Hong Kong and Malaysia whilst Australia and South Korea accounted for around 80 per cent of the recordable discs (DVD-Rs) seized in the region. The MPA also started an anti-piracy rewards program in the region, which led to many more raids and seizures than the first half of 2004, fueled by tips from members of the public. New anti-piracy ads have also hit theatre's there, once again reminding the viewers, that piracy is a crime.
Source:
The Register