We’ve all seen it: The message at the very beginning of a DVD before the movie begins to play: “Piracy is not a victimless crime.” It’s intended to remind us that buying an illegally produced DVD impacts more people than the uber rich movie studios we envision clutching mounds of cash to their chests. When a video is pirated, the original film makes less profit, and the gaffers, lighting technicians, and make up artists make less money. All the “little people” who work behind the scenes will have to scramble for other jobs, because there will be fewer movie jobs.
Back in 2004, John Malcolm, a former federal prosecutor and Justice Department attorney was settling into his new job as the Motion Picture Association of America’s anti-piracy director and was wondering about how best to deal with piracy beyond public relations campaigns and federal lawsuits. And then it came to him. “I had worked with agents, the DEA, the ATF. I was familiar with dogs that sniffed out drugs and bombs and cadaver dogs,” Malcolm said. “I knew dogs were remarkably talented, that they could sniff out all kinds of things. Dogs have a sense of smell that is roughly 40 times that of a human being.”
Malcolm approached dog trainer, Neil Powell, to investigate the possibility of training dogs to locate pirated DVDs. Powell came to discover that these DVDs have a unique odor – a polycarbonate chemical – which he imprinted on his “trainee-dogs” during a 12-week training process. Black Labrador Retrievers, “Lucky” and “Flo,” became the first two DVD detection dogs in the world and traveled the world showing how it’s done. Evidently, it’s done very well: When the pair located $2 million worth of discs hidden in unmarked boxes at a shopping center in Malaysia, their work led to 26 arrests. That lead to a $30,000 bounty being put on their heads, and the dogs were quickly gotten out of the country. The Malaysian government was impressed enough to want its own canine unit, and MPAA provided two Labs trained in Ireland, “Manny” and “Paddy.”
Lucky and Flo also worked in classrooms by putting on demonstrations: Students were asked to hide DVDs or CDs in boxes while the dogs were out of the room, and upon their return, the Labs repeatedly showed how quickly they can sniff out the discs, then freeze at attention to signal their discovery, while waiting for a treat. Lucky and Flo were featured as heroes in articles that underscored the importance of intellectual property rights published by Weekly Reader (remember reading Weekly Reader??) a magazine distributed to students in elementary schools.
In 2008, the Portuguese government announced that it had trained a dog to find DVDs, and South Africa was expected to follow suit.
Image of Lucky and Flo with police officers by Neil Powell, from the USA article here.