Cinematical

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has announced that it is making great headway in its anti-piracy campaigns in Asia and the Pacific. Since May, the MPA has been going gangbusters with their Operation Red Card, a cool-sounding offensive measure involving raids, seizures and arrests in China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. The Operation is now over, but in the three months of its activity, law enforcement agents conducted 1,919 raids, seized 6,750,350 discs and 1,483 burners and arrested 915 suspects (for a breakdown by country, see the MPA's press release).

Don't think that the world is that close to being saved from illegal copies of movies, however. China, which has it really bad as far as piracy goes, did not see any arrests nor any seizures of DVD burners, so chances are the country's pirates will simply replace their confiscated discs with new copies. As for the other countries, it is likely that new pirates and new burners will pop up to keep the contraband coming.

Still, this is a big, big win for the MPA, and the news has me thinking of a good idea for an action movie about Operation Red Card. The real story probably isn't all that exciting, but if I were head of the MPA, I would try to make it seem so. Of course there would be one central action hero (Vin Diesel ... is ... Dan Glickman) who leads all the raids, each of which would include cool shoot-outs and explosions, an eventual take-down of one central villain who secretly runs every single piracy ring, and, of course, a final montage showing huge lines at cinemas all over the world (kinda like the end of the special edition version of Return of the Jedi). The irony is that the movie would probably be bootlegged throughout Asia and the Pacific, but whatever.