Piracy wars misdirected

Piracy wars misdirected

The tepid response to a highway raid on lorryloads of counterfeit goods seems to carry a message. Police say they were acting on a tip-off when they decided to inspect three parked lorries on a secondary road just outside Korat last Saturday night. They said they found 44,000 individual items, almost all of them knock-offs of brand-name handbags, shoes, ornaments and the like. The goods were supposedly smuggled in from Laos. The media and the public showed little interest.

Even less reaction, if that were possible, came with news of another such raid, also last Saturday. Police from the Crime Suppression Division shut down a home-based pirating operation churning out illegal copies of music and movies. Six illegal migrants were busy in a home in Lam Luk Ka district, Pathum Thani, manning an operation that involved 90 disc writers. Police seized 6,900 DVDs and CDs with illegal copies of movies and music. Police claimed the value of the seized goods was 500,000 baht, an inflated figure.

The sad and sometimes dangerous fact is that during the past decade, government efforts to support international copyright, patent and trademark law have been a shambles, or worse. Strong arguments are made by aggressive international bodies that successive governments have actually enabled massive violations of intellectual property laws. A stroll through almost any mall or through tourist shopping areas provides evidence for that view.

The real news from Nakhon Ratchasima and from Pathum Thani last Saturday was not how important were the seizures of 44,000 counterfeit items and 6,900 pirated discs. The vital point of these raids was just how puny they were. Similar raids on any one of dozens of well-known shopping centres would yield 10 times those seizures. The same is true of outdoor shopping areas lined with kiosks and "specialty" vendors peddling nothing but counterfeits, knock-offs and illegal copies.

The public has become inured to the piracy of movies, music and software. Long gone are the public campaigns that sought both to shame shoppers into shunning such products and to put such heavy legal pressure on vendors that they would be driven out of business. Everyone with eyes can see the campaigns failed. But while governments were shirking their duty under both Thai law and international treaties, the truly harmful part of piracy was growing.

Today, piracy touches almost all facets of life. A counterfeit pair of status-brand shoes might seem harmless, but counterfeit medicine is widely sold in containers almost identical to the original. Low-quality tyres are fitted as high-end products, and sold to consumers unable to detect the difference.

As with human trafficking, government has long had its priorities back to front. The reason to enforce international standards in matters like intellectual property is not because Washington produces a list and ranks Thailand at the bottom.

The government's duty is solely to protect its own citizens. The current military government, like those before it, is ignoring the increasing violations that endanger and damage the country and its citizens.

The seizure of thousands of knock-off handbags and movie DVDs arouses little interest. That is because it has little effect. Enforcement of patent and trademark laws protects the health and safety of the country, even more than seizing CDs helps the Thai music industry.

Priorities matter. Getting off the "Special 301" list of worst pirates is not as important as getting dangerous pirated goods off the street.

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