Plan to curb CD piracy flops
A SCHEME to stamp out the soaring pirate compact disc trade, which offered a million-dollar bounty for information on warehouses storing illicit CDs, has flopped - after getting just one successful tip-off.
The Hong Kong branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) set aside $1 million for information - but received only one tip-off which resulted in a raid.
Meanwhile, police and customs have upgraded their efforts to halt the illegal trade after admitting it has become the fastest growing triad problem in urban Hong Kong.
Millions of dollars are at stake through control of hawker stands, they say. And detectives believe the murder of a suspected Sun Yee On triad member in Tsim Sha Tsui in July was connected with a 'turf war' involving counterfeit CDs.
The IFPI's 'cash reward scheme' ended last Friday after receiving only 356 reports.
Of those, only one call led to the seizure of pirate CDs with another 11 still being followed up.
The successful raid took place two weeks ago when customs officers seized 5,000 pirate CDs in a flat in Sha Tin. The informant received $20,000, the only reward paid out of the $1 million fund.
IFPI chief executive Patrick Wong Tsz-tin denied the scheme was a flop but conceded the illegal trade continued.
'We have achieved our objective in increasing public awareness of the problem,' he said. 'We are a long way from stopping all such immoral practices . . . it is a hard task.' Under the terms of the scheme, people who gave information leading to the seizure of 1,500 pirate CDs would have been given $8,000, with up to $50,000 awarded to those whose tip-off led to the confiscation of more than 5,000.
Mr Wong said the public had misunderstood the scheme.
'Many people just reported the location of hawkers, which was not our main target,' he said.
'Our objective was to identify stores, and preferably the factories where pirate CDs are made.' According to IFPI statistics, there was a 30 per cent drop in 1993 CD sales over 1992 figures, an estimated loss of $200 million in revenue.
Leslie Ching Pui-wai, deputy general manager of the Composers and Authors Society of Hong Kong, said he was disappointed with the results of the scheme.
Customs officers believe most of the CDs are mass produced just across the border, possibly in legitimate factories.
'It became a big problem in 1992, even worse in 1993 and now we are trying to control it,' customs Senior Superintendent Ronnie Tsang Hing-kam said.
His officers seized 70,000 discs up to July this year compared with 90,000 last year.
Senior Superintendent Tsang, head of the department's Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau, said it was impossible to gauge the size of the business or estimate how much money triads were making from it.
But one detective said: 'It has to be a multi-million dollar-a-year operation. All the money is funnelled back into other criminal activity.' Most of the illegal stores are based in Mongkok and Yau Ma Tei.
