PRESENT POINT POWER

ABOVE: The house (parked with the two new cars)in Jelutong, Penang raided by the local Anti Piracy unit from the Domestic Trade & Consumer Affairs Ministry; BELOW; The Director, M Guna Seelan

Illegal business is always a lucrative business and pirating compact Optical discs is a “get rich fast” one but not for long as the long arm of the law is everywhere. This Penang couple was using their website to get the business as the duplication and production are done by so many other local illegal SMEs ( Small Medium Enterprises).

ABOVE: The computer and laptop confiscated and BELOW: The unsent Optical VCD & DVD Packed in DHL Courier Cardboard Box

And reports indicated with the knowledge they learned in their IT studies, they managed to block ALL Malaysia IPs visiting their site. This is a relatively simple technique used by some bloggers, like the Malaysian pioneer Tim Yang at one time in June 2004. Check here.

But the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America, see below) outwitted them and with the aid of the local Anti-Piracy unit their operating base at home was raided and they were arrested.

And being pirates themselves, why bother to study to get their Master & MBA when pirated ones are easily available for a small fee from a lot of pirated U's.

ABOVE & BELOW: Samples of the well packed VCD & DVD (supplied by local manufacturers) seized from the raided house

Other sources revealed that they get good prices from retailing their VCD & DVD compact discs charging between US7.80 and US34.00 each. At these prices, it is not difficult to estimate their millionaire status within a year for an exchange rate of 1US$ = RM3.70.

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She's in the soup; They went for the high life, they went into cyber piracy
14 Oct 2006 Lee Shi-Ian , NST report

PENANG: She is 24, the daughter of a retired top civil servant, an IT graduate and now a top Internet pirate. Together with her boyfriend, a computer programmer, they raked in at least RM100,000 a month operating one of the most active websites linked to the supply of pirated discs worldwide.
A day after their operation was busted in Penang, more surprising details about the couple emerged. It is learnt that the woman is still studying, pursuing her Master’s in Sociology at a local university. She enjoyed life in the fast lane, frequenting the club scene in Penang. Two cars — a Toyota Altis and a Perodua Kancil — were parked in the porch of her house in Jelutong.
Sources from the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry told the New Straits Times that the 29-year-old boyfriend was also pursuing a Master’s in Business Administration at a local university. From documents seized from the house, the authorities estimate the couple could have raked in as much as RM1 million in the past one year from their operations.
"The suspects are IT experts. This they displayed in setting up the website," the source said. "They made it impossible for anyone using a Malaysian Internet service provider to access the website. It was only available to foreigners." The couple and a 33-year-old man involved in a similar but unrelated case were taken to the George Town magistrate’s court yesterday where the authorities obtained a five-day remand order.
They are being investigated under the Copyright Act 1987 and face fines of up to RM20,000 per optical disc seized or five years’ jail or both.

The woman’s father (top civil servant?) was present in court and tried to get her released on bail. In Thursday’s operation, officers from the ministry’s Internet Piracy team and representatives from the Motion Picture Association conducted simultaneous raids on two houses in Jelutong and Ayer Itam.
The houses had been traced as the origins of websites operated separately, one by the couple and the second by the 33-year-old man.
The couple is part of a growing trend of computer-savvy youths who use their skills to make a fast buck. Over the past two weeks, a group of youths was arrested by police officers from the Federal Commercial Crime Investigation Department for phishing. Phishing involves using email and fake websites to lure Internet users into providing their personal banking details, which are then used to steal from their accounts.
The group managed to steal RM36,000 from more than 20 bank customers over a two- week period, which resulted in police reports being lodged.
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The MPA’s key priorities are: Content Protection (through legislation, technology and enforcement), Market Access, Content Regulation and issues associated with the Internet.
General MPA responsibilities in the region include: Anti-Piracy:

Anti-Piracy actions are taken by the individual Anti-Piracy Organizations nationally but are supervised by the Anti-Piracy team based in Brussels. The piracy problems and related issues (legal, cultural, economic) vary from country to country. The key piracy issues in Europe are internet piracy, particularly illegal downloading from P2P systems, imports of pirate DVDs from Asia, the manufacture of pirate DVDs in Russia and their export to other European markets, and increased burning of DVD-Rs and CD-Rs in countries across the region.

Internet piracy is growing at a faster rate in Europe than anywhere else worldwide. This is due to rapid broadband take-up, weak laws in certain instances, and lenient public and official perceptions. The countries in the region with the most “broadband users” are Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands and Belgium. In countries with broadband penetration rates roughly similar to the U.S. (Belgium, UK, France, Netherlands), the main Internet piracy problem is the use of P2P systems. In countries with very high broadband penetration rates, high download speeds and monthly download quotas (e.g., the Nordic countries), the main problems are the use of “direct connection” applications such as DC++, “swarming” systems such as BitTorrent and simple FTP servers.

Despite such promising initiatives, progress towards compliance with Europe’s TRIPs obligation to address illegal filesharing in Europe has been patchy. France (where a number of courts have imposed suspended prison terms and fines on P2P filesharers) and Denmark (where the local anti-piracy program has successfully pursued civil claims against heavy DC++ users) have led the way in successfully seeking remedies from the courts. In addition, there have been a number of limited but highly successful local initiatives to secure criminal enforcement against Internet piracy that is commercial, organized or on a large scale, particularly in Germany. In other countries, such as Sweden, official efforts against endemic online piracy have been weak.

Despite ever-increasing enforcement activity and seizures of pirate discs by the MPA’s 35 anti-piracy programs in the region, the problem of optical disc piracy continues to grow. In the first half of 2005, pirate DVD seizures in the EMEA region exceeded 3.6 million discs. Seizures of burned DVD-Rs grew by 70% in the first six months to almost 2 million discs, and seizures of DVD-R burners jumped by 32% in the same period to almost 3,000.

Local DVD-R burning across EMEA is being fuelled by rising Internet downloading, lower prices for burners and for blank media, and by increased Customs and local anti-piracy program vigilance against pirate imports of pressed discs. Particularly noteworthy is the explosive increase of DVD-R burning in the UK during 2005, as Asian pirates reconfigure their business in an attempt to outflank our effective work with UK Customs and with law enforcement authorities in Asia, particularly in Malaysia and Pakistan.

In other markets, such as Germany, pirate CD-Rs and DVD-Rs remain a major concern. These optical discs are sourced from the Internet and distributed on the Internet via websites and auction sites. Street sales of pirate CD-Rs and DVD-Rs plague the markets in Italy, Spain, and Ireland. Heightened enforcement efforts by the authorities in Portugal and Turkey, however, working with our local anti-piracy organizations, have yielded excellent results, illustrating that where governments show the will to combat piracy, substantial improvements can be achieved.

Finally, although it is not yet a significant problem in Europe, the MPA is lobbying to ensure that the potential for camcording piracy is addressed as soon as possible to prevent the growth of this emerging phenomenon. Camcording piracy has become a considerable problem in the US and Canada, where it is a very lucrative way to pirate a movie early on in its theatrical release.

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