'Open season' on disc peddlers irks Cassa
Malaysiakini.com
Dec 23, 2006
Andrew Ong

A consumer association is seeing red over the manner in which a raid against pirated disc vendors is being carried out by the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry.

Consumer Association of Subang and Shah Alam (Cassa) president Dr Jacob George said the ministry’s officers were arresting youths and handcuffing them.

They are then locked-up in police stations with other hardcore criminals for days, he added.

“The ministry is not catching the real perpetrator behind these piracy rings. Instead, they are arresting these kids and locking them up for three to four days and putting them through mental trauma,” he said when met yesterday.

He said Cassa has received numerous reports of such cases over the past week, namely at two popular shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur.

According to him, many of the complainants claimed that enforcement officers did not produce a warrant and in some cases, even shops with their shutters drawn were cut open.

High bail 

George and his team have been in and out of many police stations offering legal assistance to the youths between 16 to 25 who were ‘squatting’ there because the ministry does not have places to hold them before producing them in court.

At the courts, the youths had to go through another ordeal - posting bail between a whopping RM15,000 to RM50,000.

“One of our clients has to spend the Christmas weekend in the Sungai Buloh prison just because he could not post the high bail. He now has to spend time exposed to hardcore criminals even though he did not commit a serious crime,” George said.

He said his sources indicated that the ministry will expand its crackdown on pirated goods to clothes and mobile phone accessory shops soon across most major cities throughout the country until February.

“Who knows how many more youths would have to go through the same fate because of the arbitrary nature of these operations,” he said.

George said the ministry should have conducted thorough surveillance of their intended targets before and obtain a court order that would be served on the proprietor of the premises.

Both the Copyright Act 1987 and the Optical Discs Act 2000 allows enforcement officials to enter premises under suspicion of violating the laws without a warrant.

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