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Published on August 20, 2007

To date he claims that he has hunted down Bt2 billion worth of goods that infringed on intellectual-property rights. And that includes everything that can be copied under the sun from pirated VCDs, DVDs and CDs to fake Levi's jeans, chestnuts and fugu fish.

Blowfish can be illegal too?

"Yes, they're poisonous and classified as drugs," said the chief of the Economic and Technology-related Crime Suppression Division.

Wisut's five-month stint has made quite an impact.

Yongsak Ekprachyasa, managing director of sales and marketing at GMM Grammy, said that his staff actually reported seeing fewer pirated CD and DVD stalls on a recent reconnaissance trip.

Such vigilance has come at a time when the US Trade Representative's annual "Special 301" is looming over Thailand. This chronicles the effectiveness of intellectual-property rights protection and has fingered Thailand, along with China and India, as among the worst IP infringement offenders in the region.

In May this year, the US elevated Thailand to its Priority Watch List, a notch above the previous Watch List, for its failure to protect American products, particularly in music and entertainment. This means bilateral arm-twisting which, according to Thailand's Board of Investment, can result in Thai products losing certain privileges. The major Hollywood studios are bearing the heaviest blow. At last count in 2005, its losses in Thailand amounted to Bt17.44 billion.

The problem is exacerbated by the advent of the Internet, said Edward Neubronner, director of operations for the Asia-Pacific region of the Motion Picture Association, a pressure group for the Big Seven Hollywood studios. Despite the trend of opening movies on the same day globally, pirates still operate.

In Thailand, offenders download movies from the Internet and then record the Thai-dubbed audio in the cinema with an MP3 recorder. The synched products can hit the market the very next day.

Thai-dubbed foreign movies have now become a grass-roots problem, said Henry Tran, general manager of Warner Bros and Twentieth Century Fox Thailand.

Despite 15-per-cent growth industry-wide, pirated movies handicap a film's revenue window. A movie that could stay for two weeks at the box office will have to be pulled out in a week due to poor attendance, said Tran.

Rubbing salt in the wound, local cable television broadcasts the pirated version of the film.

But this kind of blatant crime can only survive if law-enforcers themselves are complicit.

Wisut said that politicians and civil servants of all stripes are involved. The only way to eradicate such all-pervasive crime is through severe punishment and removal from office - which doesn't happen often.

Kinan@nationgroup.com