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Police raid DVD pirating factory

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.
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