A few months ago, I wrote about how shoddy bootleg DVDs of TV shows are being passed off as the real thing to unsuspecting fans who buy them online. Well, Canada’s Mounties have come to the rescue.

Specifically, TV Shows on DVD is reporting that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police recently uncovered a huge DVD piracy ring based in Montreal. The eight people who were arrested ran an operation with 200 DVD burners that could reportedly produce 14,000 discs a day. They operated sites under names such as DVDAvenue.TV, DVD Store and AllMyFavoriteShows.com and sold thousands of illegal discs to U.S. and Canadian consumers.

This is a big deal. When I talked to Gord Lacey, who runs the Canadian-based website TV Shows on DVD, for my original article, he noted that the retailers he receives complaints about overwhelmingly seemed to be based in Canada. He had even uncovered evidence about some bootleggers and turned it over to Canadian authorities, but was frustrated that they didn’t seem to be doing anything about it. The Twin Cities fan I talked to for that article also noted that the low-quality discs she unsuspectingly ordered came from Canada.

In its press release about the bust, the RCMP said: “The RCMP invites every person believing to have been misled into purchasing a counterfeit DVD instead of an original copy to report it to the RCMP at 514-939-8307, or to contact the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association at 1 800 363-9166 to verify the legitimacy of Web sites.”

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 11:33 am and is filed under DVDs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.