BAYTOWN, TX – Evidently the old saw is true: There is no honor among thieves.
Police in Baytown, Texas, still are scratching their heads over two Sunday busts that netted four arrests and more than 1,600 pirated films, many of them porn. The busts might not have happened at all if two competing content-theft operations hadn’t ratted each other out to eliminate the competition.
The odyssey began at about 3 p.m. Sunday when someone called the Baytown police to report a man and a woman selling drugs and movies out of a pickup truck in the parking lot of a local truck stop. When police arrived on the scene about 30 minutes later, they confiscated two loose-leaf notebooks containing copies of DVD covers and two large containers containing a total of 403 illegally reproduced DVDs.
“People could look through the catalogs to see what movies were for sale, make selections, then the suspects would get those movies out of the containers,” Baytown Police Lt. Eric Freed explained to the Baytown Sun.
When police arrested the 56-year-old man and his 41-year-old female accomplice, both from nearby Houston, the man groused to officers that he bet the competition had turned them in. As police drove the pair to the station, the man pointed out the competitors in a similar pickup truck parked in another truck stop lot.
Additional officers confronted the new suspects—a 42-year-old man from Cleveland, Texas, and a 32-year-old Houston woman—and discovered another 1,273 counterfeit DVDs in their possession.
All four alleged pirates were charged with felony copyright infringement and unlawful labeling. If convicted, they face up to five years in prison and fines of as much as $250,000 each.
Kathee Brewer is an award-winning news, feature and opinion writer, editor and photojournalist. After five years of designing adult and mainstream websites, she spent seven years on staff at AVN Online before departing for the glamorous and financially fulfilling world of full-time freelancing. Food and shelter, she says, are overrated.
