In a major move to help Bollywood, which is being bled by video piracy, the state government decided to take action against the pirates under the draconian Maharastra Prevention of Dangerous Activities (of slumlords, bootleggers, drug offenders and dangerous persons) Act, 1981. MPDA, as this Act is generally called, provides for preventive detention of an offender.


If a person is taken in preventive custody under MPDAm he is given the grounds of his detention, sent to Nashik central jail and produced before a court within three weeks. A person can be detained up to two years under this stringent Act.

The offence is non-bailable. Actually, if the Copyright Act is applied seriously by the police it will deter the pirates. For several years, Bollywood has been pleading for tough action against video piracy, but nobody took it seriously. Out of the Rs. 5,500 crore turnover of the Hindi Film industry about Rs. 1,500 crore is lost in piracy.

How piracy works for Indian Bollywood movies?

* The most common crude method is to make a camera print inside a theatre. All you need is a friendly manager or usher who will let you carry a camera into the hall. But the sound quality of such prints are awful.
* A more organized form of piracy involves making copies from a lab where the prints are stores until the release. Prints need to be kept in controlled conditions to prevent deterioration. Nowadays, they are digitally marked to expose the source of the illegal copy. However, brazen employees in movie halls and labs are still known to make copies for a payment.
* When prints are shipped abroad for overseas release in various cities, especially the Gulf, unscrupulous exhibitors are known to profit by allowing illegal copies to be made. They are uploaded and transmitted on a broadband line to computers in India.

Via: Times of India