Movie pirates target NZ

Pirated movies flooded into New Zealand last year as part of a massive increase in the number of counterfeit goods being imported.

Customs officers intercepted tens of thousands of discs as pirate traders feed a voracious market.

More than 8 per cent of all DVD movies sold in New Zealand are believed to be fakes, bought through markets, the internet, and phone order. Street prices in Auckland range from $15 to $40.

Many of the illegal movies are new releases and some on the market have not been screened in New Zealand cinemas. As one example, a Weekend Herald investigation found a stallholder in an Auckland market selling a variety of new movies, including Elektra, which had just that week hit the big screen.

A box of discs held by Customs this week revealed a variety of new movies, including Bill Murray's comedy, The Life Aquatic, released in New Zealand on Thursday.

A planned screening tonight by students of Kung Fu Hustle - the Stephen Chow movie which has been a box office smash in Asia but is not due for release here for weeks - was stopped this week after intervention by the Motion Picture Association.

The number of fake products pouring into the country, and problems with the enforcement regime, has one top intellectual property lawyer calling for action.

"We've got dishonesty becoming endemic," said Andrew Brown, QC. "We just have counterfeit products on sale regularly at the markets - that is the level of dishonesty which you are now seeing in New Zealand."

He has called for a specialist unit to be set up with increased powers to investigate and prosecute traders.

In the last year, Customs detained 56,000 sets or items suspected of being in breach of trademark or copyright laws. Almost half of those were discs, mainly DVDs.

No figures for direct comparison were available for the year before but investigations unit team leader Mark O'Toole said Customs had noticed a "huge increase" in the problem. Since 1999, there has been an increase of more than 750 per cent in the number of intellectual property cases looked at by Customs.

There has been a cooling off of the number of illegal imports in the past few months, but that has coincided with student holidays.

The Motion Picture Association's New Zealand representative, Kevin Holland, said there was a correlation between the trade in pirated movies and the number of foreign students in the country. The association has cracked down on the problem in the past six months, visiting markets and uncovering illegal dealers.

As part of the push, Internal Affairs has destroyed about 10,000 DVDs because they were being offered for sale without the proper censorship labelling. Late last year, a man was sent to jail for selling pirated movies around the Otahuhu markets, the first such prison sentence handed down in New Zealand.

While there have been other convictions, most intellectual property cases go unpunished. Customs does not have the power to prosecute, even when it catches importers repeatedly trying to bring in illegal goods. In most cases, it is left to rights holders to take civil action.

The Ministry of Economic Development confirmed it was conducting a review of the laws and the way they were enforced.

"Rights holders would like it if someone ... enforced their rights but at the same time, to just what extent should the Government become involved in enforcing private property rights?" said the ministry's intellectual property senior analyst, George Wardle.

The Law

* It is a crime to copy a recording, offer it for sale or hire, import or distribute it.
* There is no offence in possessing a pirated copy for private and domestic use.
*In civil law, possessing a pirated copy for personal use is not an infringement, but it would be a breach to distribute copies by selling them or even handing them to friends.