MUMBAI: At Blacktown Local Court in Sydney, 26 year-old Craig Farrugia pleaded guilty and was subsequently convicted, fined A$5,400 (US$3797) and placed on an 18-month good behavior bond for illegally camcording movies.

This criminal case arose from a 13 February raid by New South Wales Police, supported by investigators from the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) representing the Motion Picture Association (MPA), in which sophisticated video camcording and computer equipment was seized. Enquiries confirmed that the equipment had been used for making illegal video recordings of a number of recently-released movies including He’s Just Not That Into You, Marley and Me, Yes Man, Bedtime Stories, and Beverley Hills Chihuahua.

This is the second Australian conviction for making illegal camcords of movies in cinemas. In November 2007, Jose Duarte was convicted of making and distributing an illegal camcord copy of the theatrical release of The Simpsons Movie on his mobile phone and uploading it to the Internet. This unauthorized recording was tracked to streaming sites and P2P systems within 72 hours of Duarte making and uploading it, where it was illegally downloaded over 100,000 times and copied and sold as a pirated DVD around the world.

AFACT investigators spent several months tracking down Farrugia using amongst other investigative tools and techniques, state-of-the-art digital watermarking technology. The movie industry applies invisible digital watermarks to the prints of movies shown in cinemas. Like fingerprints, every watermark is unique and allows investigators to identify any cinema where movies are illegally recorded.

Prosecutors presented evidence before the court that the movies illegally camcorded by Farrugia were distributed by international release group “PreVail.” They had been made available on numerous web sites as well as forensically matched to pirated DVDs purchased in Australia and a number of other countries around the world including the USA, Mexico, Britain, Spain, the Philippines and Malaysia.

These ‘Release Groups’ distribute the illegal movies online to ‘Top Sites’, where the...

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