[Infowarrior] - Malaysia uses sniffer dogs to fight movie pirates

[Richard Forno]

Malaysia uses sniffer dogs to fight movie pirates

By Clarence Fernandez
Reuters
Tuesday, March 13, 2007; 10:05 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/13/AR2007031300
266.html

SEPANG, Malaysia (Reuters) - Malaysia deployed two sniffer dogs in its
battle against music and movie piracy on Tuesday, becoming the first country
in the world to use the animals to hunt for disks of illegal recordings
hidden in cargo.

Two female Black Labradors, "Flo" and "Lucky," demonstrated their technique
by sniffing through piles of sealed cartons in an air cargo hangar and then
signaling their handler about a suspect package by sitting down in front of
it.

"It's cost-effective, and in terms of time, it's very effective too," said
Domestic Trade Minister Shafie Apdal, adding that the dogs took only 10
minutes to check boxes that security officials would have needed a day to
plow through.

Malaysia, which figures on a U.S. watchlist on piracy, has dramatically
stepped up efforts to rein in copyright pirates as it negotiates a
free-trade pact with the United States.

Shafie said Malaysia would try out the dogs for a month, carrying out
searches at border posts, in cargo hangars and storage centers to see where
they functioned best before the government made a decision on setting up a
permanent dog unit.

"The arrival and deployment of Lucky and Flo will make Malaysia the first
country in the world to test the capability of dogs in detecting optical
disks in hidden compartments or shipments," he said at Malaysia's biggest
air-cargo center in Sepang outside Kuala Lumpur.

The trial is a joint effort of the Malaysian authorities and the Motion
Picture Association, which groups six major Hollywood movie companies.

The MPA has spent $17,000 on the dogs, including eight months of training to
detect the chemicals used in optical discs, one official said.

"No one's ever trained dogs to sniff polycarbonate before,"

Mike Ellis told reporters. "These dogs were taken from scratch and trained
how to sniff these chemicals."

Trained by a handler in Northern Ireland who usually teaches dogs to find
bombs, Lucky and Flo are aged three-and-a-half, and can find, but cannot
distinguish between, CDs and DVDs, burned and replicated disks, or
legitimate and pirate disks.

"However, the dogs will be valuable in locating disks being shipped in
unlikely or unregistered containers," the MPA said.

The grouping estimates that copyright theft cost its members about $1.2
billion in lost revenue in the Asia-Pacific region last year, a fraction of
annual worldwide losses of $6 billion.

In 2006, Malaysian authorities seized 25 VCD replicating machines capable of
turning out 87 million pirated disks a year.

Handler Dave Mayberry said Lucky and Flo would start work alongside
Malaysian officials on Wednesday, despite feeling the heat after moving from
temperatures of 3 degrees Celsius (37.4 F) in Britain to 36 degrees Celsius
(96.8 F) in Malaysia.

"They have a very thick coat for the cold weather at home," he said. "The
longer they stay here, the thinner that will get."