Piracy: Bootleg Loopholes
by Damian Burke
‘Legitimate’ stores selling counterfeit CDs, games and DVDs have been popping up all over the place recently, and I’ve always wondered how they get away with selling copied discs.
My flatmates recently bought Fight Night Round 3 from a shop called Cybermedia in Cape Town, for R100 - a fifth of the price of buying it in a mainstream CD store. Granted, the low DPI on the printing of the disc label and cover produce a slightly ‘spotty’ copy, but other than that the game is identical. We’re not talking street vendors with re-dubbed Afghan releases of Titanic.
I’d heard about the shop before, and one or two others (The Source), but I thought it was meet-someone-on-the-street-corner-and-use-a-fake-name kind of deal. I didn’t know they had a physical shop, catalogue and website. How could this be possible? Will we ever know?
Yes, we will know. Cybermedia have taken advantage of the infamous backup loophole. Basically they sell copies of the originals, on the understanding that you own the original. Or rather they offer “backup services”.
They manage to get away with this by printing a disclaimer on the packaging stating that they’re not to blame if you don’t own the original and land up in hot water with Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) or the SA Federation Against Copyright Theft (SAFACT).
All this aside, Cybermedia was raided in 2004. The owner allegedly shot at SAFACT and the DTI, but they still managed to seize over 250 PlayStation games and 120 DVDs. In 2005 they were raided another three times, and over 700 counterfeit DVD were seized. I read in a forum on PC Format’s website forum that Cybermedia claim they’re only in possession of "legal backups from Taiwan".
SAFACT and the DTI have yet to shutdown Cybermedia, or even chip away at the profits of the ethically questionable information market, but I won’t rule out the idea of SAFACT and the DTI being “on the books”.
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