New Association to Take on Illegal DVD Sales
The Motion Picture Association of Cambodia (MPAC), an independent body that aims to protect intellectual property, officially opened its doors Wednesday, vowing to put an end to the sale of pirated DVDs in Phnom Penh as its first order of business. “We are going…to serve everybody a notice, all the vendors, to get rid of that stuff [pirated DVDs],” said MPAC president Ung Nareth on the sidelines of the association’s inaugural event at NagaWorld casino Wednesday afternoon, which included speakers from the Ministry of Culture, the Washington-based Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Shrugging off the logistics of a city-wide DVD purge, Mr. Nareth said that that vendors who do not remove illegal DVDs from their shops will be fined $7,500 per disc. “I’ll give them five or six months or so before we start to confiscate and penalize them,” he said. … Previous attempts to stem the production and sale of pirated DVDs and CDs, including a coordinated police raid on vendors inside the popular Russian market organized by Mr. Nareth, have been unsuccessful. “What I did in [Russian market] was just an experiment…. It didn’t really solve anything,” Mr. Nareth said, explaining that while police confiscated hundreds of illegal DVDs, there was nothing to stop the vendors from acquiring more. Michael Chai, CEO of Westec, acknowledged that while replacing illegal DVDs with legitimate copies will drive up prices for both vendors and buyers, the benefits of doing so would outweigh the drawbacks. …
Ben Woods
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/new-association-to-take-on-illegal-dvd-sales-48122/
