SHENZHEN: An anti-piracy raid on a hidden warehouse operation netted police some 3 million pirated discs and a handful of suspects in what has become this southern city's largest piracy case by volume, according to a press briefing yesterday by police and officials from the cultural department's enforcement team.

The raid was part of a three-month nationwide crackdown on piracy that kicked off on July 15.

The pirated discs, which had an aggregate market value of 30 million yuan (US$3.8 million), had been smuggled in from neighbouring Hong Kong and other overseas areas by sea, said Fu Renyou, a director of the city's cultural enforcement team.

Most of the discs contained cartoon series and educational materials, he added.

The authorities discovered that some of the discs had been produced by two Hong Kong audio and video companies that did not have permission to sell their goods on the mainland, said Li Ruizhang, deputy director of the office in charge of suppressing pornographic and illegal publications. Li presided over the briefing.

Because Shenzhen is adjacent to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, many smugglers use it as a kind of distribution centre for pirated audio and video discs destined for different markets on the mainland, Li said.

He added that Shenzhen Customs had handed over an "amazing" number of pirated discs to his office, estimating that the number was as high as 20 million to 30 million a year.

The 3 million discs confiscated in the police raid had been stored in two secret warehouses in the basement of a department store in Shenzhen's Bao'an District, near the No 107 national highway. The discs were being sold in surrounding cities.

About 20,000 officers raided 4,630 audio and video shops in the city during the three-month anti-piracy campaign, capturing more than 5 million pirated audio and video discs and 3,000 discs containing pirated software.

Source: China Daily