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Legal
Convicted music pirate ordered to pay up
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 28 July 2010
A judge at east London’s fashionable Snaresbrook Crown Court has ordered a convicted music pirate to pay record label trade body the BPI £170,000.
Farrah Nissa was jailed for copyright crimes in 2008 for his role in running a counterfeit CD operation which sold an estimated 1.2 million bootleg discs, mainly containing funky urban beats. The conviction was achieved through the collaborative efforts of global trade body IFPI and the aforementioned BPI, and once achieved they started working with the Regional Assets Recovery Team to get their hands on the money Nissa made through his illegal operation, employing a thing called the Proceeds Of Crime Act 2002.
The challenge was working out and proving just how much Nissa had made from his piracy venture. RART and BPI presented the results of their work to the East London court this week and, based on their findings, the marvellously named Judge Inigo Geoffrey Bing ordered Nissa to hand over £170,000 (well, actually, much of the cash will come out of the assets of Nissa seized by the authorities after the original conviction).
In a statement, BPI anti-piracy chief David Wood told reporters: “This was a complex and lengthy enquiry into an organised criminal gang who had tried to hide behind a shield of respectability”.
Meanwhile IFPI piracy man Jeremy Banks said: “Today’s ruling shows that when it comes to music piracy crime really does not pay. We have always pursued a strategy of disrupting the manufacture and supply of counterfeit CDs, now in the UK we are able to take the profit out of the process as well”.
Nissa’s partner in crime had already been ordered to pay £70,000 following similar proceedings last year. The money will be shared out between the BPI’s members.
