MPAA steals British sniffer dogs

THE MPAA KNOWS a good thing when it sees one. Stories of computerless single mums being dragged screaming and penniless to the courthouse for allowing their daughters to listen to music online are all grist to its mill.

Its campaign to make people pay for stuff they can get for nothing thrives on the oxygen of publicity.

And so when British Copyright Cops at Fact (Federation Against Copyright Theft) recruited out a couple of hounds to sniff out pirate DVDs, the MPAA wasn't slow in wading on to take some credit.

Now, it seems that the MPAA has gone so far as to dognap Fact's canine sniffers.

For the story Reuters carries today of a pair of dogs named Lucky and Flo, who are embarking on an MPAA publicity tour, seems remarkably familiar.

Could this be the lucky and Flo that back in May, following an eight-month training period, were deployed in England's Stansted Airport?

There, as we noted at the time, the "results were amazing," according to Raymond Leinster Director General of Fact.

After a good days sniffing none of the packages and parcels the dogs rooted out on their outing to the airport turned out to be fake. "All were legitimate," said a FedEx spokesman.

We wonder, naturally, what a fake DVD smells like, compared to a real one. µ

L'INQ
MPAA sends in the dogs