‘Make piracy a non-bailable offence’

As piracy continues to deprive Indian films of enormous amounts of revenue, industry experts have demanded that it should be made a non-bailable offence.

Speaking at a Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) event on Wednesday, secretary general of the Indian Music Industry (IMI) Savio D’souza said, “I don’t think there’s any solution to piracy other than enforcement. A film’s marketing team and enforcement teams have to work together.”

Harish Dayani, a top executive of CD and DVD manufacturing company Moser Baer, lamented that India did not recognise piracy as a grave crime. He gave a sense of how worrying the malaise had become.

Three years ago, when the company decided to drop the prices of its products, one lakh distributors signed up to make them available at retail stores. Today, even though it has dropped prices further and offered to give two DVDs free on the purchase of one, only 2,000 of those distributors remain.

“Annually, Indians buy only two million original DVDs as against 600 million pirated ones,” he said. “This country purchases more cars and bikes than original DVDs. It appears that a majority of Indians just don’t see any reason why they should buy originals.

You can imagine the repercussions of this on the film industry’s revenue.” Experts said that in India, DVD sales formed only about 5-8% of a popular film’s revenue as against 40% in Hollywood.
Hiren Gada, director of Shemaroo Entertainment, said: “India’s highest-grossing film last year, 3 Idiots, made about Rs300 crore.

If one takes Rs100 as the average ticket price, about 30 million Indians in a country of 1.2 billion people (or less than 3%) saw the film legally.”

UTV, Big Pictures, Moser Baer, Motion Pictures Distributors’ Association and Eros Entertainment formed the Alliance Against Copyright Theft (AACT) six months ago. Representing AACT, UTV’s vice-president Prakash Nathan said, “So far we have conducted about 100 raids using 20 police stations, with 110 arrests and seizures of 3.4 lakh DVDs. We’ve tracked down internet pirates through their IP addresses.

For example, a majority of illegal downloads for I Hate Luv Storys happened from Delhi, Islamabad and Mumbai. Also, about 93% of the film’s internet pirates were from Asia itself, while only 3% were from Europe.”

Panelists urged citizens to join the battle against piracy by reporting incidents of pirated disks being sold on toll-free number 1800-1031919.