In the biggest bust of a pirated media production racket this year, Taipei County police seized 42 DVD burners and nearly 60,000 bootleg DVDs and arrested seven suspects on Thursday after raiding a Sinjhuang, Taipei County, residence, the Movie Picture Association (MPA) said yesterday.
Representing Hollywood's biggest production studios overseas, the association had enlisted the help of local police after discovering flyers advertising cheap DVDs in Taipei nearly two months ago, senior MPA official Frank Shih (施育霖) said.
What followed was a police investigation involving forensic science and dogged detective work, culminating in a raid of an "underground factory" with a yearly production capacity of 1 million black-market DVDs, Shih said by telephone yesterday.
"It was a very systematic operation," he said. "They had all kinds of movies [ready for shipment], from Hollywood blockbusters to pornography."
Police traced the flyers to a Sinjhuang address after using them to order the DVDs, from which they then lifted fingerprints that led them to the address, Shih said. They also leaned on the flyers' publisher to divulge information on the source of the DVDs, he said.
The factory had distributed close to 1,000 fliers daily advertising its pirated DVDs in northern Taiwan before the raid, an MPA press release said.
Two Taiwan-based MPA officials accompanied a group of "six to seven" Taipei County police officers on Thursday's raid, Shih said. Five suspects with prior arrests for piracy were arrested on site, with two more arrested later that day, he said.
"These piracy businesses are very well-organized," the MPA release said. "They use many methods to escape detection and are often run by crime syndicates."
Such syndicates are often global in scope, taking orders here for pirated products that secret factories in China churn out, said Stella Lai (賴秀雯), a marketing manager for Business Software Alliance, a group that helps top software-makers fight copyright infringements.
The products are then smuggled out of China via a third country, Lai said.
"But we're seeing less and less of the kind of factory that was raided Thursday," she said.
These days, almost half of all piracy occurring in Taiwan involves software, leading to losses of US$122 million for the global software industry, she said.
US businesses said that Taiwan is home to the highest rate of Internet infringement of business software in Asia.
Media-disc burners seized in Thursday's raid were among the 534 burners confiscated nationwide this year, a far cry from the 1,552 burners seized last year in more than 30 factory raids countrywide, Shih said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods