US citizens in China DVD bust
p2pnet.net News:- “Spring Action” a joint operation between Chinese and US law enforcement agencies, resulted in the arrest of two American nationals, the “leading suspects in a pirated DVD trafficking ring,” says ChinaDaily here.
Rudolph Hobson Gutherie and Cody Abram Thrush were apprehended, together with four other suspects, said China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS).
“This is the first-ever co-operative joint investigation between the two countries’ police forces on DVD piracy,” ChinaDaily quotes Gao Feng, deputy director of the ministry’s Economic Crime Investigation Department (ECID) as saying.
MPS officials it was also the first DVD piracy case they’d, “cracked via the Internet”.
Gutherie and Thrush were caught with the help of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Bureau of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), says the story, going on that more than 210,000 DVDs were seized, along with seven computers, telephones, a “large quantity” of mail bags, “several other tools” and “200,000 yuan (US$24,096) and more than US$67,000″.
“[...] this criminal case contains criminals from different countries, thus their crimes were well covered and hard to detect,” Kong Xianming, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau, says in the story.
In China, making selling ‘pirated’ DVDs carries penalties starting at five years in jail, adds ChinaDaily.
July 31st, 2004 at 1:07 pm
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/07/27/129219.shtml?tid=153&tid=214&tid=129
In China, you need to be a major trafficer in counterfeit goods to worry about the police. But in the USA, just creating and selling T-shirts displaying the name of a TV show can get you busted under the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act was passed to stop World-Trade-Center-type terrorists, but in the usual case of mission-creep, the draconian powers it gives law enforcement have now been applied to everything from drug possession to … copyright infringement.
Maybe China’s not such a bad place after all.
http://www.sg1archive.com/nightmare.shtml
October 15th, 2004 at 9:15 pm
It’s not a RING. Also i’d like to thank the intelligence agency for their indepth “investigation”. I’m hoping this doesnt go to far..i havent heard of them raiding the chinese military bases for dvd productions