5 arrested for Internet piracy

Today, Singapore, Aug 3, 2005

Police have arrested five people for peddling pirated materials on the Internet. The four men and a woman, aged between 23 and 41, were rounded up at their homes.

Officers from the Intellectual Property Rights Branch seized 1,600 optical discs along with computers and electronic gadgets.
The group is said to have conducted their illegal businesses at a particular online auction site popular with surfers. To avoid detection, they used electronic bank transfers to facilitate payment. They bought the pirated movie optical discs from overseas and mailed them to the buyers. Police said the suspects made a profit averaging $100 to $400 a month. — 938Live

Source for the above news is Today Newspaper in Singapore. I stopped downloading any movies from Internet long back. I did download few music & movies last year. But movie quality were really bad and most of the time it was not full movie, so, I stopped it because it wasn't worth spending hours downloading movies. Also, I can listen to online music from free sites, which is not download but legal streaming, like raaga.com.

Singapore Govt changed law and now Govt can action on any illegal download, even if the original copyright owner never knew about it or does not complain. Earlier, the original copyright owner must complain to get any action taken by Police on any illegal download. That make the process very hard for agencies to prevent illegal downloads. But since Jan 2005, its not the same now. I have already stopped downloading any music or movies from net. So, I am not in danger. I never download any pirated software from Internet, maybe I am worried about virus or something. But this is good. I use most of free software for my work. I am not a Linux fan, and still use XP. But I have free software installed on my PC for Firewall (ZoneAlarm), Spyware Remover(SpyBot), AntiVirus(Avast), WebServer (Abyss, to check my web pages locally), PDF Creator (CutePDF), Download Accelerator (DAP), Multimedia Player (VLC Player) or even Video Converter like TMPGEnc. Well, I can list out a lot here. Whenever I require a software, I do a search for free software, read some user comments on it or reviews, and decide about that. I do have some paid software as well, but most of it comes along with my hardware, like Nero or ULead DVD Movie Factory.

Well, its Friday night and I am going to watch KBC tonight. This is its second run and I hope it rocks like the first one. Its almost time, just 20 min to go. c ya in my next post...

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