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DVD pirates – the dogs have your scent!

You shouldn’t approach this posting too seriously.  I’m certainly writing it with tongue firmly in cheek! 

I couldn’t help putting my own – very personal – slant on the recent BBC News website report that sniffer dogs are being deployed in Malaysia to aid in the search for pirate DVDs and CDs.  Trained in Northern Ireland where dogs have normally been disciplined to sniff out explosives, Flo and Lucky, two female black Labradors, are being shipped out from Belfast to Kuala Lumpur for a month long trial as part of a joint initiative between the Motion Picture Association and Malaysian authorities.  You go girls! 

Of course, the dogs won’t be able to tell if what they find is legit or not – that’ll be up to their handlers and customs authorities to discover that – but using them is cost and time effective, and with them the hunting out of possible contraband will be enhanced.  I admire the organisers’ thinking; after all, dogs are proven sniffers not just for explosives, but drugs and even fruit, so why not have them keyed to scent the trail of the chemicals used to produce CDs and DVDs? 

Now I welcome new initiatives to combat IP piracy, and am largely dispassionate in my assessment to them.  But in this case, my old imaginative engine started whirling, and my thoughts took on a somewhat vengeful colour, transporting me where no decent human being really ought to go… 

Those of you from my previous posts who’ve learned of my filmmaking background and my personal experience discovering the piracy of my own product (see I a film piracy informer, Thursday 4th January 2007), will know that theft of moviemakers’ IP is a particular bug-bear of mine.  You won’t be surprised to learn then that, thinking about those pouches pounding the pavements of dockyards and warehouses in the far east, I couldn’t help myself wishing I’d had my own dodgy-DVD-detecting doggy back when I had that close encounter late last year with a pirate at an estate agents, or – better still – in a Chancery Lane bar where all those years ago I had the crocodile smile face-to-face with a fiend who’d filched my film. 

My fantasy went something like this; I wondered how this talent of Man’s Best Friend’s could be, shall we say, tweaked.  I imagined my own dog’d only need to smell a perp’s guilt, and it’d be on them in flash of furious fur.  Have you seen the sitcom Spaced?  If so, you’ll probably recall a scene where comic store owner Bilbo Bagshot tells our hero Tim Bisley the as it turns out not-so apocryphal tale of an ultra-Socialist called Minty he knew who’d trained his dog, Gramsci (named after an Italian Marxist), to smell out the wealth of – then attack – rich people.   

Now applying that tale to this news report and my personal history made me stare wistfully into the sky… rather like Space’s military nut Mike Watt does whenever thinking about destroying things (if you can’t picture what I mean, try Series 2 episode 5…you see what I’m talking about – great episode too).  Yes, I could see it clear as day; the pirate’s incriminating evidence strewn over the carpet whilst she’s chased away screaming from the estate agent’s, or my doggy enforcer’s jaws tightly clenched round the throat of floored Mr Git, squeezing him into desperately spilling the name of the website from where he’d downloaded the illegal copy of my movie.   

Yes, I’m well aware that as fantasies go my own IP enforcement equivalent of a Dirty Harry was vindictive, petty and foolish and served no useful purpose whatsoever, but it was fantasy.  And it felt good!  I think the term we’re looking for in this scenario is “cathartic” – so don’t knock it ’til you try it. 

Still… I wonder if such dogs as these will be sold on once retired?  Maybe I could give one a good home.  Dirty Harry – rather than Gramsci – might just suit it as a name too.  Heh, heh… 

Told you not to take this post too seriously. 

© 2007 Julian Boote  All Rights reserved.

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