An anti-piracy raid on a warehouse in China netted police some 3
million pirated discs and a handful of suspects in what was the
largest piracy case by volume in Shenzhen, according to a police
press briefing yesterday and officials from the cultural
department's enforcement team.
The raid was part of a three-month nationwide crackdown on
piracy that got underway on July 15.
The pirated discs, with an estimated market value of 30 million
yuan (US$3.8 million), had been smuggled in from Hong Kong and
other countries by sea, said Fu Renyou, a director of the city's
cultural enforcement team. Most of the discs were cartoons or
educational, he added.
The authorities discovered that some of the discs had been
produced by two Hong Kong audio and video companies that don’t have
permission to sell their goods on the mainland, said Li Ruizhang,
deputy director of the office in charge of pornographic and illegal
publications.?
Because Shenzhen is adjacent to the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region many smugglers use it as a distribution
center for pirated goods destined for various markets on the
mainland, Li said.
He added that Shenzhen Customs had handed over an "amazing"
number of pirated discs to his office. Li estimated that the number
was as high as 20-30 million a year.
The 3 million discs confiscated in the raid had been kept in two
warehouses in the basement of a department store in Shenzhen's
Bao'an District near the No 107 national highway. The discs were
being sold in surrounding cities.
About 20,000 officers raided 4,630 audio and video shops in the
city during the three-month anti-piracy campaign. They took
possession of more than 5 million pirated audio and video discs and
3,000 discs of pirated software.
(China Daily December 14, 2006)