Plan to eliminate pirate VCDs gets good response

JAKARTA (JP): The government's plan to eliminate pirated VCDs nationwide starting from Friday received a warm welcome from the VCD industry and a legal expert.

They, however, strongly urged the authorities to first identify and apprehend major pirates instead of arresting small- scale traders and rental shop owners.

Contacted separately by The Jakarta Post on Thursday, Hayidrali Muhammad from the working committee of the Indonesian Corruption Watch of the Foundation of the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute and Wihadi Wiyanto, secretary-general of the Association of the Indonesian Video Recording Industry, said that raiding retail and rental shops would only cause further unemployment during the economic crisis.

"Thousands of people would lose their jobs, which would create another social problem," Hayidrali said.

According to Hayidrali, the massive operation against shops selling or renting out pirated VCDs would leave at least 33,000 people jobless.

He therefore suggested the government arrest major pirates, of which he said there were three in the crowded Glodok electronics business center in West Jakarta.

He also said the authorities should let small-scale traders continue business as usual for the next three months during which time they could sell out their stock of pirated VCDs, he said.

"Such a scheme would be more effective than conducting massive raids across the country," he said.

Agreeing with the suggestion, Wiyanto added: "It would be better for the authorities to remind the retail and rental shops once again before completely closing down their businesses."

The director of Film and Video Recording Supervision of the Ministry of Information, Suryanto, announced on Wednesday that beginning Friday, the ministry with the help of the police would carry out a nationwide operation against producers, distributors, retailers and renters of pirated VCDs.

"The cleanup will be conducted because the deadline of Feb. 25 against anyone producing, distributing, selling or renting pirated VCDs is already final," Suryanto said.

According to reliable sources in the industry, netting major VCD pirates in the capital would not be difficult.

"There are only three or four big VCD pirates here. They are not invisible but just untouchable because of the power of their money," said one source.

These three pirates, he said, own 85 percent of the country's total annual production of 17 million copies of pirated VCDs.

"They're probably the biggest pirates in the country."

One of them, for example, was believed to have distributed 350,000 pirated copies of Titanic in the local market.

The other three along with other middle and low-grade pirates produced hundreds of thousands of copies of the same title with different covers and illustrations.

"Some of them were also shipped to neighboring countries," he added.

"To start such a promising multibillion business, one should have an investment of billions of rupiah for the VCD recording machines," another source said.

"Once you have the recording machine, you are able to meet a gigantic order for duplicating, say 400,000 copies of a title, in just a matter of minutes," he said.

As a comparison, in the early 1970s, a pirate in Jakarta would spend a whole day producing a few dozen pirated videocassettes, he added.

"It's really big money here and the public has nothing to complain about because people really need cheap products for entertainment. On the other hand, pirates can gain big bucks easily as the raw materials, mostly plastic, required for duplication process are quite cheap," the source explained.

He insisted that the growing VCD piracy business in Indonesia and other countries in Asia had strong support of parties in the United States.

"What kind of technology do we have here to obtain a copy of a film which just premiered in the States, for example?

"The answer is we get help from certain parties there who, for instance, videotape movies with digital handycams and then sell the copies to pirates in this region," he said.

According to Farouk Cader, resident manager of the Los Angeles-based Motion Picture Association, the retail price of authentic VCDs, which is about Rp 50,000, is the cheapest in the region.

"It's about three times lower than those of the same quality in neighboring Singapore," he said.

"It's the best price we can offer.

"Even at that rate, which many Jakartans still believe is expensive, many authentic VCDs are smuggled to Singapore and other countries," he said.

"It's a very dilemmatic situation," another source said. (jun/bsr)