Pirates of the carrier bag

Illegal DVDs are ubiquitous. But they’re costing the film industry a fortune, reports David Rose

It is late on Saturday afternoon and “Mai”, a young Chinese woman, has just walked into a crowded East London pub, carrying a supermarket carrier bag. She approaches the tables of drinkers with a knowing smile, offering them an open fan of multicoloured artwork in polythene wrapping. Emerging from her bag are dozens of pirate copies of the latest and future cinema releases, burned on to DVDs. “Three for ten pound, ” she announces, “or four pound each.”

It is a scene now familiar in pubs, markets, workplaces and even school playgrounds across the country, with the titles covering all genres and tastes — from V for Vendetta to The Shaggy Dog. All come complete with printed sleeves brazenly bearing registered trademarks.

This violation of copyright, as well as online file-sharing and home burning, is estimated to cost the UK audio-visual industry more than £800 million a year.

The Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), the antipiracy agency, states that one DVD sale in three involves a bootleg copy, making the British market the second worst affected by piracy in the world, after the United States.

Behind the sales pitch of people like Mai is an organised criminal industry with its own production and distribution network. The discs are made by a London-based boss, she says, but she buys them from “friends” for £2.50, dividing any profits with another boss from southeast China, leaving Mai with around £1 from each sale.

“Good week, I make 200 quid,” she smiles. She has been hawking pirate DVDs in Britain for three years, which means she could have made around £30,000 in untaxed income. She eventually hopes to return home with what she has saved.

The British film industry is worried. A week after a series of dawn raids on Merseyside, the biggest single crackdown on counterfeiting and benefit fraud seen in Britain, Raymond Leinster, Fact’s director-general and a former policeman, explains the scale of the problem. “DVD piracy is the most lucrative crime that organised criminals are involved in,” he claims.

Fact seized more than two million pirated discs from street sellers and markets last year, but this is less than 5 per cent of the total in circulation. The current focus is on catching those burning the discs.

Rest of the story at Times Online