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Two Birmingham Men Are Arrested By UK's New Intellectual Property Crime Unit
cervesaebraciator writes "The Guardian reports that the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has arrested two men from Birmingham and have seized 'suspected counterfeit DVD box sets worth around £40,000, including titles such as Game of Thrones, CSI and Vampire Diaries.' The claim is that the men were buying foreign counterfeit copies and selling them online as genuine. London police commissioner Adriad Leppard offers commentary indicative of the thinking behind these efforts, saying, 'Intellectual property crime is already costing our economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year and placing thousands of jobs under threat, and left unchecked and free to feed on new technology could destroy some of our most creative and productive industries.' The article offers £51 billion as an estimate for the cost of illegal downloading to the music, film, and software industry, a figure they say will triple by 2015."
Meanwhile, Netflix is paying attention to piracy via torrent sites as well. The difference is that they're using that data to decide what shows they should buy.
They were mis-describing it when they sold it, if you read TFA. That's bad because it means that the purchasers weren't making an informed decision. By and large, counterfeit box-sets will have lower quality packaging etc than the originals. If they're just burns of TV-rips, then they may also have on-screen network watermarks and other artifacts missing from the official home release.
Plus the people buying it might actually have wanted their money to go to the creators of the show. Even if you're the neckbeard type who believes that all intellectual property is theft, you don't want to say that selling by deception is right?