THE scourge of movie piracy is likely to become worse in the future, with pirates becoming harder to catch.
No thanks to the advent of technology, some movie pirates abroad have become savvier - they no longer peddle DVDs but digital media files, which are downloaded illegally via the Internet.
What this means is that these high-tech pirates do not even need a stall space to sell their wares like they do now.
All they need is a mobile computer which has a huge storage capacity and they are in business.
As a result, the authorities will have a harder time to detect and catch them because they do not need physical wares, such as a display of DVDs, to expose them.
While the pirates in both Singapore and Malaysia have yet to jump onto the high-tech bandwagon, a number of pirates in China are already doing a brisk business of selling digital video files to their customers.
All the customers need to do is to hand over a portable hard drive to the pirates, select the movies, and the files will be downloaded on the spot.
The cost? About $1 for a movie and 10 cents for each episode of a television series.
This means it costs a customer less than $100 to buy 100 blockbuster Hollywood movies, or just $30.70 to download all 307 episodes of all eight seasons of the hit TV series CSI.
As a comparison, an original movie DVD can cost about $25, while a TV series, about $80 per season.
A Singapore businessman, who is based in Beijing, told The New Paper on Sunday: 'I stumbled onto one of these stalls while I was shopping one day. They have movie posters all over the stall but not a single DVD in sight.
'When I asked the owner what he was selling, he said 'movie files'.
'When I told him I don't have any storage device, he offered to sell me one that could store a few hundred movies.
'I am shocked that movie pirates have become so high-tech!'
Apart from being cheaper than pirated DVDs, some of these movie files are 'very clear' because they are downloaded in high-definition.
In Thailand, a spokesman from movie industry watchdog Motion Picture Association (MPA) said that syndicates there have been known to burn DVDs on the fly.
Mr Edward Neubronner, MPA director of operations, Asia-Pacific, said that they operate from multi-purpose vehicles.
Customers select the titles and the movies are burnt on the spot, he said.
Last year, MPA working with regional authorities conducted 13,000 raids and seized 31 million pirated movies in the Asia-Pacific region.
But efforts by the authorities have seen encouraging results.
CLEAN AS WHISTLE
Shopping malls, such as Holiday Plaza in Johor Baru, Malaysia, and Sim Lim Square in Singapore are now 'clean as a whistle'.
Gone are shops displaying pirated software and movies.
Mr Neubronner said: 'When you have an aggressive level of enforcement, it shows that the authorities have zero-tolerance for piracy. This will drive the pirates underground.
'Ultimately, you know the effort works when nobody buys these things (pirated movies and software programs).'
Nevertheless, in future, cheap technology may see a rise in consumers buying more pirated materials.
A general manager for a games software company said: 'If portable disk drives or powerful thumbdrives become very cheap, then it would be logical that people will go to the illegal movie shops to download rather than buy. The next frontier for syndicates will be cyberspace.
'But at present, the cheaper and viable alternative are movies burnt on DVDs.'
The general manager, who did not want to be named, said that only a small group of people download movies from cyberspace.
The majority do not mind paying $4 each for pirated movies.
And syndicates will still sell DVDs because the 800 per cent profit margin seems too irresistible, he said.
The costs of producing one pirated DVD movie is between $0.30 and $0.50, he said.
This article was first published in The New Paper on 20 July 2008.
