This pirate finds gold in illegal movies
Source:News-Journal Online Date:Friday, 9 April 2010. Article Type:General
Forget Blockbuster or Netflix. Abdol Hossein Fouladi could sell you the latest movies -- even films that were still playing in theaters -- for under $4, right from his 1998 gold minivan.
All 17,000 DVDs were kept in cardboard boxes, each individually wrapped in a sandwich baggie with the movie's title written across the top. Fouladi could pick one out in less than a minute, police said.
But Holly Hill investigators said Fouladi's enterprise is a highly illegal one called piracy -- the unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted content -- and he was arrested Thursday and charged with unauthorized copying of films and phonographic records. The crime is a first-degree felony under a little-used state statute, said Police Chief Mark Barker.
"This is not something we ever deal with," Barker said Thursday. "What was in this guy's possession was staggering."
But there was more. When police searched the suspect's Ridgewood Avenue apartment, they found another 4,000 movies on DVD, all pirated and some pornographic, Barker said.
Detectives arrested Fouladi after he sold an undercover buyer -- Cpl. Jeff Miller -- 12 movies for $40 from his Chevy van, Barker said.
Pirating movies and other copyrighted content such as sound recordings is an "enormous problem" in the U.S., a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America said in a phone interview Thursday.
In this case, where the movies were in DVD format, someone likely sat in a movie theater and used a camcorder to copy the film right off the big screen, police and the MPAA said. But there's no evidence that Fouladi did that himself, said Sgt. Gina Baker.
"We only have evidence that he burned the movies onto DVDs," Baker said.
In 2005 -- the last year for which data was available -- the U.S. motion picture, sound recording and software/ video game industries lost more than $20 billion because of piracy.
Pirated movies burned to a DVD -- which is called hard goods piracy -- accounted for $11 billion of that, said MPAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Kaltman.
"We can only assume that the losses to the industry now are still in the billions," Kaltman said from her office in Los Angeles. "This is something that's happening all over the country and all over the world. It's an enormous problem."
The amount of pirated DVDs that Fouladi was busted with even surprised Kaltman.
"That's a lot," she said. "Usually you hear about people having less (DVDs) in their possession and then more in their home, not the other way around."
That's because crooks are fully aware of just how many DVDs they can carry in their vehicles and get charged with only a misdemeanor, Kaltman said.
While Fouladi may not have been the frontman with the camcorder at the cinema, the MPAA -- which is sending an investigator from Miami to Holly Hill today -- will be able to tell which movie theatres the motion pictures were copied from, Kaltman said. Each movie has a digital watermark on it, she said, and that's how MPAA investigators track down the movie theaters.
As for Fouladi, he is still at the Volusia County Branch Jail on $4,000 bail, a booking officer said. While jail inmates are allowed to watch movies on TV, they're not the first-run films Fouladi was used to, the officer said.
By Lyda Longa.