Seems that my country, Canada, is becoming target #1 to the MPAA and those bodies fighting against movie piracy… and perhaps for good reason.
A recent report is suggesting that almost almost 50% of illegal movies recorded in movie theaters from camcorders and then made into DVDs are recorded in Montreal. That’s a HUGE number… so big I have a hard time believing it. But there may be a good reason for this imbalance. The good folks over at M&C give us this:
Because movies are released in French and English in Montreal, it gives pirates a leg up on the European market, Corriveau said. While the duplication is done in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver have become major players in the bootleg black market.
I’ll go on record again. I hate the MPAA prosecuting little Billy No Date for downloading a copy of “The Gil Next Door” from the internet (it’s not like he was going to buy a copy anyway), but I have no problem with them taking the fight to where it should be fought… against the people doing the recording and then releasing it. That’s just my opinion.
Yeah I live in Toronto – I don’t know how prevalent this is elsewhere in Canada – but the chinese malls here outwardly sell illegal videos… and video games… and music… and cell phones…
I mean they rip all newly released DVDs and sell them for I think 5 bucks a dvd – they download movies and encode them on dvds and sell them – they sell burnt video games for I believe 10-15 dollars (I know they have sold XBox, Dreamcast, Playstation, and Playstation 2 games).
But whats bizzare about it is that they are so open with it. You could walk down the street and see a sign DVD PS2 games $15, CD games $7. If you walk in, they hand you a big binder with scans of all the games/movies covers, and then you choose what you want and they give you a burnt cd. And still, it doesn’t matter who you are – they will sell to you, and everyone in the area knows about these stores – I mean EVERYONE…
Like with cell phones, they will sell you whatever phone you want and input the chip into it so it can run on whatever companies network (or something like that I don’t quite recall the specifics)…
I do believe that one of the bigger malls – Pacific Mall got raided recently but… I think they still sell all that illegal stuff.
A friend of mine used to work in a film shipping warehouse, and has told me that there is a lot of piracy in Montreal. In fact, it’s possible to trace back each pirated film to the theatre in which it was bootlegged, and Montreal (my home town) is definitely a top spot for movie piracy.