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The pirates hit back
STOP PIRACY. Buy Original," pleads the blurb of the VCD. The social message then gets interesting. "With Love, Manisha," it adds with a very graphic visual of the actress. Also revealed is the title of the film beside that: "Ek Choti Se Love Story"!
But wait a minute, it is `Choti Se' and not `Chottisi' as the still unreleased controversial flick facing a High Court stay, is officially spelt. With the VCD available on the stands in the grey market and released under a label `Sadaf Video', you are in half a mind that maybe it is original. Maybe the producers are just passing it off as a pirated version to escape the wrath of the judiciary. For a mere 100 rupees.
And what does the VCD dish out? A reasonably clear print of the D-grade adult certified film also carrying commercials of kiddy product — Chintu Candy!
If the print was pirated, where did the advertisers spring up from, you wonder.
You have a look at the compilation that you picked up from the same shop — songs from `Five Star', `Lesa Lesa' and `Run'. The CD has stills from the film and a record label too — Mummy Audio, it says. Turn around and you see the address — "California Main Road"... wait a minute, and where's that... maybe somewhere near Los Angeles Nagar? And there are phone numbers, fax numbers (which you later discover do not really exist) and even an e-mail address. It's another story that the quality of sound is sub-standard.
Anyway for 75 rupees, it is a steal, you think. And steal is the word.
For there's nothing legit about it. Our pirates just got smarter. After getting tired of dealing with the policemen who come for their routine crackdown and subsequent mamool, the pirates have decided to get techno-savvy... and appear legitimate! With fake record labels, fake addresses and professionally done up photo-collage out of publicity stills made available on the original inlay covers of audio CDs, the lines between the legit and the grey are slowly blurring. If not for the obvious spelling mistakes and fake addresses and substandard printing, even the educated lot would be conned with the `DVD quality' blurbs on pirated VCDs carrying official publicity stills from the latest blockbusters. And how could you blame the poor techno-illiterate constables on the beat who can't tell you what the letters VCD and MP3 stand for but drop in for the surprise checks and raids.
The new age secret agent XXX who will grace cinema halls only from October 18 has been making rounds in the grey market for more than a month even after raids.
At a video shop in Anna Nagar West, immediately after the raid and after all pirated VCDs were seized, there were still hordes of unreleased English flicks which the owner claimed was legal, just because they had labels (most of them fictitious).
In another case, the police seized all VCDs off the shelves. "The police do not know to distinguish between original and pirated, so they took away even the original ones. So it does not make sense to invest in original CDs," a video hawker says. "Last time, I brought the prints thinking they were original. But they are all camera prints. Look at this package and tell me how will you know if it is real or a duplicate copy without breaking open the cover," he asks.
The minute an original DVD hits the stands, multiple VCD copies are duplicated overnight and distributed all over Chennai with colour Xerox inlay covers and photo-manipulated graphics. If the label on the VCD says Universal on Warner, it is very unlikely that even the educated of the buyers could tell the difference.
Technology is blurring the difference between the legit and the pirated. And the police have quite a task at hand — How can they tell a clone from an original?
By Sudhish Kamath
Illustration by Varghese Kalladav
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Life
Bangalore
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Coimbatore
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Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
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