If you’re a DVD pirate, there’s now a price on your head.
A downtown L.A. Business Improvement District and the Motion Picture Association of America have pooled their resources and are offering $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of illicit video disc manufacturers.
It’s the kind of law enforcement technique more often associated with drugs and gangs, but Kent Smith, executive director of the Fashion District BID, said it’s been a success. Forty four calls have been received from tipsters wishing to claim $1,000 rewards since the program was launched early December. Four of the tips have resulted in ongoing investigations into possible illegal manufacturing facilities, he said.
The program was conceived after vendors in Santee Alley, long a focal point for sales of pirated DVDs, became more discreet. Instead of distributing them from sidewalk blankets, Smith said, delinquent vendors are surreptitiously hawking unauthorized movies from their backpacks on the move.
“So we put our heads together and decided to target their manufacturing facilities,” Smith said. Hence, the rewards.
Illegal DVDs, he said, are produced in devices called “burning towers” that can copy up to 30 at a time at the secret locations targeted by the rewards program. The pirated movies, police said, often originate as recordings made by hand-held digital cameras taken into theaters.
“These rooms have anywhere from five to 50,000 illegal DVDs ready to be distributed,” said LAPD Cmdr. Blake Chow.
The Fashion District has long been home to the manufacturing of pirated DVDs, with about 22,000 illegal DVDs and music videos seized there last year, Chow said.
Manufacturing or distributing pirated DVDs can be prosecuted as felonies punishable by probation or jail time.
Smith said that the reward program might be sending a message to traffickers that an enforcement crackdown is serious. In January, only 30 illegal transactions were reported on Santee Alley compared with as many as 1,000 per month, as was common.
The district’s hotline for reporting illegal DVD manufacturing plants is (213) 741-2661.
“People are starting to get the message that this is not a good thing,” Smith said.
