Sniffer dogs help Malaysia nab disk pirates: paper
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysian investigators have shut down a factory capable of churning out thousands of pirated movie DVDs every day and detained four men in their biggest such bust in two years, a national newspaper said on Saturday.
Aided by Lucky and Flo, the world's first sniffer dogs trained to smell out the chemicals used in the disks, anti-piracy officials raided the factory after more than a week of surveillance, the New Straits Times said.
The pirates had used more than 500 bags of strong-smelling urea-based fertilizer to try to mask the odor of the disks, but even this failed to throw the dogs off the scent, it said.
Ahmad Dahuri Mahmud, an official of Malaysia's domestic trade ministry, estimated the pirates had produced 54 million ringgit ($15.6 million) worth of illegal disks during the three months they had operated in an industrial area just outside the capital.
"The disks had been packed in boxes and made to look as if they were goods being couriered," he said.
The raiders seized six German-made machines capable of stamping out 60,000 disks a day, along with 750 kg (1,650 lb) of the polycarbonate material used to make the disks, and two trucks, the paper said.
The raid was the latest in a series of dramatic seizures by authorities in Malaysia, which figures on a U.S. watchlist on piracy, after they boosted efforts to rein in copyright pirates during negotiations for a free-trade pact with the United States.
Local media say movie pirates have put a bounty on the dogs after the Black Labradors busted a fake DVD ring in the southern state of Johor this year, sniffing out about $3 million worth of movie and game disks in their first major successful operation.
The dogs are being trialed until late August by Malaysian officials in a joint effort with the Motion Picture Association, which groups six major Hollywood film companies.
The group estimates that copyright theft cost its members about $1.2 billion in lost revenue in the Asia-Pacific region last year, with annual worldwide losses of $6 billion.
($1=3.459 Malaysian Ringgit)
