57 cuffed in UK anti-piracy crackdown
Operation Zouk
Posted in Music and Media, 4th August 2004 15:29 GMT
Free whitepaper – Dell solid state disk (SSD) drives
UK anti-piracy investigators arrested 57 people last weekend in a nationwide crackdown targeting music, film and computer game piracy. Many of those arrested as part of Operation Zouk could face benefit fraud charges along with copyright offences - 45 of those collared were on benefits.
Department of Work and Pensions' anti-fraud investigators combined forces with the police and Trading Standards to swoop on wheeler dealers at markets and car boot sales in the North East, East of England and Yorkshire flogging the likes of Troy, Spiderman 2 and Shrek 2. The raids, which followed tip-offs from the public and honest dealers, netted over half a million pounds worth of DVDs and CDs.
The investigators also worked closely with organisations in the music and film industry – the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS), the British Phonographic Institute (BPI) and the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT). ®
Related stories
German dealer jailed for MS packaging fraud
Cottage shop games pirate, spammer and pornographer jailed
Software pirates cost $9.7bn in Europe - BSA
Free whitepaper – Migrating to the new Dell Management Console

Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Enabling The Agile Data Center

Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide
Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter