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original url of the article : http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/163682/1/.html

3 arrested for illegal distribution of copyright songs on Internet
By Pearl Forss, Channel NewsAsia

SINGAPORE : For the first time, three men have been arrested for the illegal distribution of copyright songs on the Internet. The Intellectual Property Rights Branch of CID (Criminal Investigation Department) acted on information received from the Recording Industry Association of Singapore. The three suspects, aged between 16 and 22, were found to have illegally distributed songs in digital format on an Internet Relay Chat channel. They configured a computer programme to send broadcast messages to IRC chatters, inviting them to download songs from their computers. Persons found guilty of illegally distributing copyright materials are liable to a fine not exceeding $10,000 per article, and a maximum fine of $100,000. They can also face a jail term of up to five years or both. - CNA/de
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I am not sure why guys are still going for this. Its not worth taking the risk! I know its tempting, but hey, you should understand the law as well. These teens are not mature I guess. They are just doing it for fun and thrill of it. This is sad that law has to take its course, but my sympathy goes with their family as well. As a parent, one can feel the agony their parents must be going through at this time. With the age group, all are school or collage students. And with this, they got a bad stamp for all of their career. I know a lot of people world over share movies or songs between themselves. In fact, I am not sure if giving my copy of original movie DVD to my friend to watch is leagal or not, but I do it. I and some of my friends buy original movies and shre between ourselves for watching. It cut cost to all of us, instead of everyone buying their own copy. But making a duplicate copy of my original DVD / VCD and giving it to someone is illeagal and I know it. Recently, one of my friend had got DVD of Mughl-E-Azam, an old hindi movie, which is re-released recently with colorization process, making the movie color from its original black&white. I was already having the original B&W DVD in my collection, but wanted to catch the movie in color. It was not released here and recently there were two shows as part of Indian Cine Festival, but tickets were sold out. So, I borrowed the DVD from my friend, and was surprised by the copy. Normally Hindi movies in DVD are just movie, thats it, no extra features, nothing. So, the only difference between a VCD to DVD is picture quality, and sometime sound (not all Hindi DVD gives 5.1 audio). But this one has two disk set with lots of extra features, including deleted scenes and one full extra song, which was not included in original classic movie. So, after watching it, I wanted to include this movie in my collection as well. I could have simply made a copy of it with my DVD writer, but instead I purchased the copy from shop. Its been a while I downloaded any mp3 even from net. I use to do it earlier. But now, I have a broadband connection, and I can listen to online music from sites such as raaga.com or humfm.com, instead of downloading the music. This way, I am not doing anything illeagal and enjoying the music as well. I am not sure why people go for download, when other options are available. Last year, I tried downloading movies from IRC channels, but I got fed up very easily with that. The quality of movies are not watchable, and most of the time its not full movie. You spend hours in downloading movie and when you watch it, you think its not worth it. So, I stopped doing it altogether. Not because of the law, but because of the fact that its not worth it.

Anyway, life goes on...

Police have arrested five people for peddling pirated materials on the Internet. The four men and a woman, aged between 23 and 41, were rounded up at their homes.
Officers from the Intellectual Property Rights Branch seized 1,600 optical discs along with computers and electronic gadgets.
The group is said to have conducted their illegal businesses at a particular online auction site popular with surfers. To avoid detection, they used electronic bank transfers to facilitate payment. They bought the pirated movie optical discs from overseas and mailed them to the buyers. Police said the suspects made a profit averaging $100 to $400 a month. — 938Live