Anti-Piracy Dog Uncovers Huge Cache of Discs

sgt scrub writes "I've never thought about sniffing my CDs before buying them but that is all about to change. According to this Yahoo! news article, dogs can be trained to tell the difference between a legit copy of a DVD and one from those pesky pirates. From the article, 'A DVD-sniffing anti-piracy dog named Paddy has uncovered a huge cache of 35,000 discs in Malaysian warehouses, many destined for export to Singapore, industry officials said on Wednesday. Paddy was given to Malaysia by the MPA to help close down piracy syndicates, which churn out vast quantities of illegal DVDs. The dog is specially trained to detect chemicals in the discs.'" We ran a story about anti-piracy dogs being trained in Ireland a few years ago.

Comments

Misleading summary

[Anonymous Coward]

The dogs don't smell the bits on the discs and determine if they spell out "Pirate!" or "Legit.". The dogs smell out optical discs and thats it. Then they take the dogs and go to a shipment/warehouse/whatever that isn't supposed to have any discs in it, and let the dog loose. If they find discs, chances are the discs are illegal in some way. And it turns out that people who smuggle pirated copies don't have them clearly marked on their manifest.

So yeah, the dogs find discs. Officials check to see if there are supposed to be discs here. If not, they probably just sniffed out illegal discs. You know, because if they were legal discs, you'd just put them on the manifest.

35,000 is not "huge"

[Lev13than]

Well, the title says "Anti-Piracy Dog" so it must have a means of smelling the contents of the disk

That's not the only thing misleading about the title - 35,000 is not exactly a "huge" number of discs.

According to Amazon, a 10-pack of slim-line discs measures 3x6x5 inches. That's 90sqin, or 9sqin per disk. Multiply by 35,000, and you get 315,000sqin. Sounds like a lot, but that's only 180 square feet. The entire stash would sit neatly on two pallets (stacked 6.5' high) or in 1/15 of a standard shipping container.

The same number of disks stored on 100-pack spindles would fit in a 4'x4'x3' stack, or slightly more than the cargo area of a Yaris. So, kudos to the dog for finding such a small target but deduct points for the overly-enthusiastic headline.