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Anti-Piracy Dog Uncovers Huge Cache of Discs

Posted by samzenpus on from the follow-your-nose dept.

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.

2 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So the dog go off on any dvd-r by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I doubt there's any difference in the type of polycarbonate used for pirated DVDs versus legitimate ones.... Chances are, they are trained to smell a significant concentration of any optical media in a single place. If they smell a trace of polycarbonate, e.g. a dozen DVDs, that's not suspicious. If they smell 35,000 of the things and the warehouse isn't a disc manufacturing company, a computer company, or a computer/movie/music store, such a high concentration of media in one place screams "professional pirates"....

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  2. Yes, they smell different! Try it! by jriskin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just opened a spool of CD-R's, DVD-Rs, and compared them to Pressed DVD/CD's. The burned disks are QUITE STRONG in oder and its EASY to tell the difference even between CD-R and DVD-R at least with the disks I'm smelling. While they may have trained the dogs to smell for all of it, the dogs nose is WAY more sensitive than mine and I can easily distinguish after smelling a few.

    Dogs would have ZERO problem telling them apart. It should be fairly trivial to give dogs a sampling of various burned media and then have them sniff them out.

    I'm surprised people even think this is even far fetched. Sound pretty straight forward to me. But, then again i'm practical and the first thing I tried was smelling a bunch of media...