wmlro.com: if you think counterfeit DVDs all originate in China, think again

Although the production of so-called pirate material is not new, it has, generally, been a cottage industry in Europe.

All that changed in 2003 when Khalid Asgar-Sheikh funded the purchase of equipment which was shipped into the UK via Hong Kong and Vietnam and set up what police described as the first industrial replication plant in Europe.

An illegal immigrant, Chinese national 34 year old Xin Li ran the inhuman resources side of the business with a stream of illegal immigrants smuggled in from China and kept in slum conditions, paid a pittance and kept under lock and key, allowed out only to hawk DVDs under supervision on the streets.

Just how central the operation was to the counterfeit industry was demonstrated by the manner of its discovery: customs officers at Stansted Airport were suspicious of a package containing a service manual for a car and ten original master copy disks of films.

The production was traced to a factory in Walthamstow, East London where disks were made and printed and inserts producted and a warehouse in Harlow, north-east of London used as a distribution centre.

But prosecuting the four men was not easy: from finding the disks in 2006 to conviction took three years.

The Asghar-Sheikh family lived in North Chingford, an expensive suburb close to Walthamstow which is, generally, rather run-down and shabby.

But that was then, and this is now. And in the past year, London's police have raided several more sites, often describing each one as the largest yet.

In April, the Metropolitan Police (which covers the whole of metropolitan London except the City) and the City of London Police raided what the Met described as " the UK's largest ever illegal DVD manufacturing facility." That plant, in Wembley, was producing new releases Watchmen, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Reader and Gran Torino. It also printed covers. It had 50 PC-independent DVD towers, each with 9 burners with a theoretical maximum throughput of 450 copies every ten minutes.

Shortly before that raid, police had found 420 DVD burners together with other equipment plus approximately 60,000 burned and packaged DVDs ready to be despatched and 38,000 blank DVDs and one million printed covers.

The link between counterfeit product and other organised crime activities was demonstrated by a raid, also in Walthamstow, in 2005. Police officers were making a routine sweep of the area looking for stolen and abandoned cars when their interest was raised by a factory operating unusual hours. The Met says "they discovered a huge DVD factory with approximately 40 DVD towers, each with nine DVD burners, eight DVD label printers and two industrial sized machines, which appear to have recently been delivered." But that was only part of the story. As they searched, they found a cannabis factory with 115 plants. And on further investigation a large quantity of pornography. All of those arrested lived and slept on the premises.