Pirate DVD Operation Stokes Industry Fears

Police in Thailand for the first time have uncovered an underground factory that produced illegal DVDs, increasing movie industry fears about the rapid rise of DVD piracy.

The Motion Picture Assn. of America said Wednesday that its anti-piracy unit in Thailand accompanied the Royal Thai police on a raid this week of the factory about 15 miles from Bangkok. Five people were arrested, the MPAA said.

At the factory, police found two production lines and an underground rail tunnel used by the pirates to secretly cart the illegal discs to a second building, where they were packaged for shipping. The pirates had been stamping out copies of “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “The Mummy Returns” and “Final Fantasy.”

“This is the first time we have seized an optical disc line that has been manufacturing DVDs illegally in Thailand,” said Ken Jacobsen, director of the MPAA’s Worldwide Anti-Piracy Office. He said many of the bootlegged movies seized this week were probably destined for the U.S., Britain, South Africa and other English-speaking countries.

Movie piracy costs Hollywood an estimated $3 billion a year. In 1999, the MPAA assisted in the confiscation of 600,000 illegal DVDs in Asia. Last year, the number swelled to 1.9 million, and more than 2 million DVDs had been seized through August of this year, Jacobsen said.

In recent years, anti-piracy sleuths in Asia seized mostly illegally produced movies on video compact discs, an inferior format popular in Asia. Studios released legal copies of movies on the VCD format in Asia but not in the U.S. and Europe, Jacobsen said.

“We are beginning to see a shift from VCD to DVD pirates,” Jacobsen said. “We’re seeing the copies come back into the U.S., and into Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. That’s our newest concern, and a very substantial concern.”

The Thai factory had two production lines, one for VCDs and the second for DVDs. Thai police confiscated 3,000 VCDs, including copies of “Dr. Dolittle 2” and “The Mummy Returns;” 7,000 DVDs, including “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace”; more than 1,000 music CDs, 1,000 software CDs and about 3,000 pirated movies released by small and independents studios.