Malaysia has started using its latest weapons in an aim to tacle the high piracy of music and movie content going through the country's biggest international airport. Like how officers often use sniffing dogs for drugs, in this case, they are using two black Labradors on hire from the MPAA, which have gone through nine months of training to sniff for polycarbonates, which are chemicals used in the production of optical discs.
While some may wonder how the dogs can be used if some packages may contain legitimately bought DVDs, such as a spindle of blanks, what they target are packages where the contents are marked as something else, such as to fetch discs hidden in parcels. When the dogs were left to sniff 50 boxes with a cargo complex, in under 10 minutes, the dogs uncovered a box containing pirated content of the TV show Friends. The dogs have been found to be more cost effective and quicker than enforcement officers and Malaysia is evaluating whether to take on its own dogs. Malaysia is one of the 36 counties being watched for serious copyright violations by the US and around 5 million discs were seized in the country last year, with over 2,000 raids.
Thanks to RTV71 for letting us know about this news.
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By
DVDROM-CompactDisc (guest),
Sat 17 Mar 2007 19:26
Okay, this is totally nuts. Pirated content of the TV show Friends?
It's absolutely 100% legal to make a copy of Friends in the US. Perhaps copyright laws in Malaysia are far more draconian than those of the US although I somehow doubt that. The whole thing with so-called infringement on the net is that some companies have made the incredibly tenuous argument that freely uploading data somehow implies copyright infringement because the uploaders do not have a license to distribute the content. That's a tenuous argument that falls apart when there is no exchange of money involved. But that is the argument made on the net.
We're not talking about the net here though. So, setting aside the fact that this net argument is bullshit to begin with, how in the world does that have anything to do with someone posessing an archive copy of a broadcast televsion show on DVD or thousands of them for that matter? There's nothing illegal about having copies of Friends on a DVD. Copying TV shows is a completely legitimate act. The whole DVR industry is based on this premise. Even if we don't consider the DVR, there are terrabytes of video available for free on the net. What if I take my three thousand documentaries I downloaded from Google video to Malaysia on DVD? Those videos are freely available and burning them to DVD is perfectly acceptable. What is up with dogs sniffing out people's bags because they contain perfectly legal materials? For what? What's the point of this? Who's interests are served here? Talk about some screwed up priorities. The Friends example in the article is absurd. If this is true it is nothing but a waste of time and resources.
Labs are awesome.
