A major video piracy racket that caused a loss of about Rs. 25 crore to the film industry was busted in a three week-long operation in June that involved the arrest of four people in Chennai, Hyderabad and Vijayawada.
The first operation involved the arrest of Chennai-based Rajendra Puvvadi who allegedly ran a physical piracy racket specialising in cam-cording and burning pirated copies of compact discs and digital video discs (DVD). Investigation revealed he had allegedly shipped over five million valued at about Rs. 4.09 crore (US $ 7,16,000).
The titles affected included over 1,000 English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam films.
At a press conference here on Monday, D. Suresh Babu, president, A. P.Film Chamber of Commerce (APFCC) that two operations were launched by the Crime Investigation Department headed by the Additional DGP S.V. Ramanamurthy with help from representatives of the Anti-Video Piracy Cell of the Chambers and the Motion Picture Distributors Association-India (MPDA-I).
In the second move, Kathula Chaitanya and Vinod of Hyderabad and Praneeth Motamarri of Vijayawada were arrested. They were accused of running a syndicate focussed on internet piracy, owning three illegal websites and uploading movie content to over 22 international ‘cyber lockers’. The probe revealed that they allegedly uploaded over 1,450 movies in all languages and that the websites had general a whopping 20.9 million illegal downloads.
All this become possible after an MOU was signed between MPDA and APFCC in March this year, said Rajkumar, chairman of the Anti-Video Piracy Cell, and Uday Singh, Managing Director, MPDA-I.
