Asia producing pirate DVDs 'worth £400m'

Organised gangs in the Far East have set up 51 factories to churn out pirated DVDs that would have been worth £400m in the shops, the American film industry claims.

"Overall, [piracy] is getting worse," Michael Ellis, the regional director in Asia for the US Motion Picture Association (MPA), said. "Asia is really a centre of piracy that is distributing products to the rest of the world."

The gangs were improving their distribution, moving from copying CDs to DVDs, and undermining the economy because they paid no taxes, Mr Ellis said. Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines are being urged by the MPA to pass laws to regulate the import of copying machinery and the polycarbonate raw materials DVDs are stamped from.

A music industry chief said 600,000 jobs in the European business were at risk from internet music piracy. Unless record labels put more effort into their own subscription-based electronic services, workers"are all potential victims" of illegal song swapping, Jay Berman, of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, which represents record labels, said.