Piracy 'crippling' cinemas

KRS Film Distributors claim that piracy is crippling the cinema industry which has seen admissions drop by almost a quarter in the past year.

"This year we witnessed a 22 per cent drop in cinema attendances and I wouldn't be surprised if some cinemas tell us they plan to close down if such rampant piracy continues unchecked," KRS general manager Charles Pace said.

Mr Pace was fuming after hearing that pirate DVD copies of this summer's blockbuster, War of the Worlds, released just last week, were being sold openly by hawkers at Valletta's open-air market.

War of the Worlds, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, has been this season's most anticipated film and it is ironic that pirate copies are being sold just a few metres away from where Hollywood's most revered director was filming in Republic Square last week.

Mr Pace pointed out that pirate copies of War of the Worlds must have been selling for a few weeks because KRS had received reports from United International Pictures in the UK that one of its exhibitors had purchased a copy after the cruise liner he was on made a stop in Malta.

To add insult to injury, pirate copies of the animated adventure film Madagascar, which opened on the big screen last Friday, were also on sale together with Herbie: Fully Loaded, which will be released locally in the second week of August.

All three films were bought from the stall for Lm5, with the hawker offering the "deal of the day": seven DVDs for Lm10.

"This recurring situation is damaging the film industry and only serves to give us a bad image abroad," Mr Pace said.

"We make every effort to ensure that films are released at the same time as in other countries and then you discover the film is already selling on the black market, before it is even released."

Joe Borg, programme director of the Association Against Copyright Theft, echoed Mr Pace's sentiments and said piracy was a recurring problem that had to be dealt with.

"We can no longer have a situation where the person responsible is charged in court, pays a petty fine and then continues selling pirate CDs and DVDs the very next day in the very same place," he said. Mr Borg said the police were making an effort to clamp down on piracy but somehow the culprits were not being deterred and pirated copies continued to be sold openly.

"Piracy is rampant worldwide, it's not just a problem here, even though the island has a strong reputation for piracy. However, here we need tougher penalties," he insisted.

When questioned about what was being done to tackle this problem, a spokesman for the Home Affairs Ministry said the police carried out raids regularly though resources were stretched due to the need to tackle illegal immigration. It was impossible to focus solely on this crime, he said.

Certain court sentences sometimes failed to reflect the seriousness of the crime, he admitted.

When contacted, the police insisted that action had been taken to tackle the problem: In the first six months of this year the Economic Crimes Unit had carried out 119 raids and seized 19,839 DVDs, 1,524 PlayStation games and 3,980 audio CDs, among others.

"The unit is continuously carrying out daily routine checks and searches at open markets and outlets to combat Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)," the police said in reply to questions.

"A number of highly targeted persons who mostly had the control of IPR at hand, were constantly and routinely raided on a number of occasions to the extent that they altered the genre of their business. This does not mean that IPR is no longer of interest to our unit. Certainly not, however, this is evidence that the situation is completely under control," the police added.

Right on cue, the police yesterday morning seized 293 pirate DVDs in a raid on the Floriana market. A man of 53 from Bahar ic-Caghaq and a 20-year-old from Naxxar are expected to be arraigned this week.

The investigations are being conducted by the police Economic Crimes Unit.

The need to reduce piracy and counterfeiting through more effective enforcement was tackled during the recent G8 Summit in Gleneagles, showing that piracy and its links to organised crime are being taken seriously at the highest levels.

A G8 statement issued after the summit said that effective intellectual property agreements contributed to sustainable growth for all countries.

Among the concrete steps proposed was the need to promote and uphold laws and improve coordination of anti-piracy crime strategies.