Germaine Smith, Staff Reporter
ON JUNE 23, the Intellectual Property Unit of the police force's Organised Crime Division heralded its emergence on the music and electronic data landscape with a destructive show, which in many ways was constructive.
In a much publicised event, the police destroyed for the first time in Jamaica a haul of pirated CDs, audio and video cassettes. They cleaned up 4,402 CDs, 700 audio cassettes, 14 DVDs and nine VHS tapes by crushing them to prevent any possibility of them returning to the streets from which they were seized.
While the show was grand, it is an early yet determined step forward by the Jamaican government to curb intellectual piracy.
On June 14, street vendor Rackine Bogle was fined for breaches of the Copyright Act when he appeared in the Corporate Area Criminal Court at Half-Way Tree. He faced $200,000 in fines or six months in prison for music piracy.
Bogle is one of 70 persons charged with several counts of music piracy under Section 46 of the Copyright Act. According to the police who arrested him, he was heavily fined because of the magnitude of his operation.
The head of the unit, which is slowly making headway, is Detective Inspector Winston Lindo.
He says that since they became operational in 2003 they have scored 25 convictions.
LIMITATIONS
Despite these successes,
however, he notes key areas where the unit is hampered.
One is the unresponsive nature of the music industry players who the piracy affects directly.
To prosecute effectively, the police need complainants. They need the people who the piracy affects to come forward with reports that prove they are being ripped off, plus follow-up assistance. This is seriously lacking, according to him.
"The co-operation from the deejays, singers, producers, and music fraternity in general could be better," notes Inspector Lindo. "Sometimes they make the initial move and go in to make reports, but when they are needed to follow up with statements and court appearances they fall short."
Because of this, he adds that the police tend to work mostly with the legitimate distributors of music and computer software, for example. This is so that they can tie in the prosecution of software piracy with that of music.
The other challenge which the unit faces is one which seems to be holding every other sector in the country at its mercy violent crime.
The resources available to the police quite often have to be focused on violent crime prevention and control, so priority is not given to crimes of the non-violent nature.
"Because of the crime situation we face a resource problem," Lindo adds. "Much of the resources of the police have to be put into tackling crime, so we cannot focus as we would like on tackling piracy... Based on the crime situation, sometimes our operations have to wait for a while. We have three official staff members, plus access to other members of a mobile team for the operations."
EDUCATION
This team, however, may be needed for more urgent operations from time to time.
One other key areas is ignorance and the problem is two-pronged. Several members of the public are completely unaware that reproducing someone's intellectual work and profiting from it without compensation to the originator is illegal.
"These people who are ignorant are those we mostly fine for trademark breaches... For the music breaches, however, we find that most of them are repeat offenders. We will arrest them today and later on we have to do the same," he said.
The second part of the problem, however, awaits the police after they have arrested the perpetrators.
"Prosecution in court is the biggest challenge so far. We find that many of the clerks are not that familiar with the laws yet, because they are fairly new (1993). Some of them have to take time to familiarise themselves adequately with the laws for prosecution. Additionally, people do not see it yet as a crime, so they don't see it as something important," Detective Inspector Lindo said.
As Inspector Lindo concludes, however, Rome was not built in a day and they are slowly inching towards public awareness and more prosecutions.
The very fact that there is a unit in the police force designated to deal with intellectual theft is a sign that Jamaica is catching up to international standards in some respects.
Though the war on the practice of piracy has not abated in the wider world, Jamaica's jumping on-board cannot be seen as negative.
