Anti-Piracy Raid in Port Moresby

A lot of people think that Papua New Guinea is far behind from the rest of the world. This is far from the truth and even modern crime has reached its pristine shores. Piracy has hit Papua New Guinea in a big way.

In 2009, the Asian shops around the country specifically the Asians from China introduced a battery operated boombox to which you can attach a flash drive to play your music. This device proved to be disastrous to the music industry and in 1 year, industry sales fell by more than 20%.

The company that I work for is the biggest record company in the country and through the years, we have done many raids. I personally have led quite a number of investigations and raids. It used to be that piracy was done on cassettes and CDs. Today, it has gone all digital and shops around the country use computers to sell MP3s. These unscrupulous businessmen not only sell illegal digital copies of music, they also sell videos including pornographic materials which they sell to anyone who can pay including young people. They do not care if they corrupt the country's youth.

We have been investigating a number of shops involved in piracy around the city with the police and we finally got the search warrant to go after these pirates last February 29, the leap day of all days. We had 11 teams as this was to be a simultaneous raid as we knew that the pirates had their own network and they only need to hit the delete button to destroy all evidence. I joined the team for Gordons market, the toughest area amongst all the ones we investigated.

We deployed at 10am after a briefing by Chief of the Criminal Investigation Division. We had a heavily armed mobile squad with us who were armed with AR-15 rifles. As soon as we arrived at the location, members of the mobile squad quickly secured the perimeter as the area can quickly explode into chaos.

I along with 3 policemen from the mobile squad quickly went up to get the customers to serve the warrant, leave the premises, and conduct the search. Our search quickly bore fruit as the computers were loaded with thousands of songs and videos which included pornographic material. The shop keepers, one of which could barely speak english were asked to produce their work permits & passports. We quickly rounded up all evidence and took them back to the Boroko police station to do a more thorough search on the contents of each and every computer.

Here are some photos from the day:

mobile squad securing the perimeter

inside the computer shop

going through fake windows and other fake software

the various computers containing illegal copies of music

I hope these pirates learn their lesson. In today's world, so many people disrespect copyright. In fact, most young people these days think it should be free not thinking of the cost of production and all the time, effort and resources that went into making a song. Three cheers for the good work done by the PNG Royal Constabulary specifically the CID.

Ciao!