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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.
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Now the blind won't have to worry so much about being sold pirated copies of their favorite movi... oh... nevermind.
I plan to coat all of my real DVD's in steak, that should distract 'em!
instead of training dogs to help guide handicapped people
They are; the heads of organisations like the MPA clearly have learning difficulties.
Blank until
So apparently recording agencies are able to do anything except record good music. They can bribe judges, hire lawyers, buy congress, complain, make commercials and now train dogs. You would think that with all this money they could come up with a working business model other then abusing the legal system.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Who knew that the evil bit had a smell?
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
How about just data only disks with no movies on them?
Well, the title says "Anti-Piracy Dog" so it must have a means of smelling the contents of the disk. Given most movies lately, I don't envy it.
If they train a dog to sniff out Bittorrent packets, I'll be truly impressed.
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"....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Every time I hear of copyright infringement being called theft or piracy it just bugs me. If you think it is, you're wrong and the law backs up the "slashdot accepted definition" perfectly. The piracy that is most targetted are illegal copies FOR SALE. These are the same illegal copies that the DVD CSS does not prevent. These are the same illegal copies that never needed the DMCA.
This story illustrates precisely what piracy is when it comes to copyrighted media.
...aren't these the guys we _want_ the MPAA/RIAA to go after? These are the commercial infringers who are operating outside of the law for profit. I'll be happy to argue with you guys (i.e. - on your side) all day about personal use not being an infringing act, but this - imho - is exactly what the copyright laws are written for.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
http://www.cannabisculture.com/v2/node/8634
I have found pot wrapped in plastic, layered next in mustard, followed by a tinfoil layer, smeared with grease, re-wrapped with more plastic and finally blanketed with scented dryer sheets and dropped into coffee grounds!
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...
That's funny, because my dog's trained to sniff out bullshit. She's getting really yappy right about now, too.
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.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
That sounds like a name of a mascot/fake_superhero the MPAA uses to explain copyright to children.
Jimmy: "Have you seen the new OMG Ponies movie?"
Jane: "No. Hey, let's download it!"
Jimmy: "Yeah!"
[Whooshing noise]
Jimmy and Jane in unison: "Anti-Piracy Dog!"
Anti-Piracy Dog: "Hi kids. You were about to download a movie. Every time you do that, a pirate throws a puppy into a wood-chipper."
Jimmy: "Is it the cute kind of puppy?"
Jane (nearly in tears): "That's the only kind of puppy there is! Oh no! I don't want cute puppies to die! What are we going to do?"
Jimmy (gravely): "We'll have to buy our movies, and only from authorized resellers."
Anti-Piracy Dog: "That's right, kids. So remember, don't pirate those movies."
Jane and Jimmy in unison, overflowing with cheer: "Thanks, Anti-Piracy Dog!"
Anti-Piracy Dog: "Up, up, and away!"
[Whooshing noise]
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
in related news,
a blind person was killed Tuesday night with two bullet wounds on his head. Watts Witham, 32, was found dead near a suspected pirated CD factory. His guide dog, Serpico, apparently was guiding him for an evening stroll when it sniffed the pirated CD chemicals emanating out of the factory. Unbeknownst to Mr. Witham, Serpico followed the scent and as the pirates found out of Mr. Witham's presence, they murdered him and dumped his body nearby.
This was the second incident after an Anonymous Coward suggested on an internet forum that "we can do both" train dogs as sniffing agents and guide dogs.
Pirating is a bit of an issue in Malaysia. A couple of years ago I took a bus from my wife's home city of Ipoh to the airport in Kuala Lumpur. The bus had a DVD player and they had The War of the Worlds playing. The problem was that the audio track was in Russian and the English subtitles appeared to have been imperfectly translated from the imperfectly translated Audio.
I was certain that we had a problem there when I watched Tom Cruise running from the aliens yelling my elephant has gone to Europe!
http://michaelsmith.id.au