Source: TheStraitTimes
The Philippines is not just a market for pirated copyright products.
It now houses clandestine operations which manufacture such products for export to other parts of South-east Asia, and as far afield as Latin America.
In a special report on optical disc piracy – which includes illegally copied software, music, computer games and movies on CDs, VCDs and DVDs – the Manila Times said overseas syndicates have shifted their operations to the Philippines to escape crackdowns at home.
And law enforcers, who used to think that such products were being smuggled in from abroad, are increasingly alarmed.
‘Until early this year, the Philippines is known to be a distributor country; the pirated stuff they are selling here came from neighbouring countries,’ Ms Carmen G. Peralta, director of the documentation, information and technology transfer bureau of the country’s Intellectual Property Office was quoted as saying in the report.
‘Only lately did our enforcement agencies catch increasing numbers of stamping or duplicating machines.’
Such machines, she said, can produce four copies in just a second.
One machine can produce tens of thousands of copies in a day.
The newspaper said sources from the recording industry revealed that a raid on a production facility in Manila as early as in October 1999 had yielded 53,000 pirated music CDs, 396 stampers, one replication machine, and a printing line.
The factory, it was later found, was established and financed by a syndicate based in Hongkong.
The report also revealed that more recently, a plant in Manila was found to have been set up by Malaysians, who shifted their operations to Manila to escape tight law enforcement at home.
A raid had yielded large quantities of optical discs, replicating machines and stampers of Malaysian origin, it said, while six Malaysian nationals were arrested.
Philippine intelligence sources estimate there may be about 35 underground CD production lines in the country, said the report.
Almost half of them have been busted, according to the National Bureau of Investigation.
But the problem is far from being licked, said the newspaper, which quoted sources as saying that such underground production plants are linked to organised crime groups from Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Hongkong and Taiwan.
According to the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, the newspaper said, several Asian countries including Taiwan, Hongkong, Macau and Malaysia had in recent years introduced stricter CD plant regulations.
Feeling the heat, syndicates in these countries then shifted their operations to new locations where rules are more lax, such as Thailand and the Philippines.
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