HELP! POLICE!

The police demonstrated a new level of craziness last week with a bit of ... selective copyright enforcement

I’D HAVE GIVEN ANYTHING TO BE A FLY ON THE WALL DURING THE MEETING AT NAKHON RATCHASIMA POLICE STATION THE DAY IT WAS DECIDED TO IGNORE ALL OTHER FLAGRANT COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENTS

Here I am reporting to you live at nighttime, somewhere along Sukhumvit Road in the heart of tourist territory. I’m camouflaged. Gone is my delicately stitched, fashionable-grey tailored suit from Raja’s Fashions. Instead I have put on some fake Wranglers I picked up at Chatuchak earlier this year, and a T-shirt that reads MUAY THAI in big letters. For those passers-by who never got around to achieving literacy, accompanying those words is a cartoon of two Thai boxers battling it out.

I’m wearing a cap that says BKK in big letters, too. I have a pair of fake Ray-Bans from Silom. I think you get the idea … I’m disguised as a tourist.

Normally at this time of night I am home in my leafy Samut Prakan mansion, feet up on a pouf, reading the latest Jackie Collins before going to bed. But there are times we have to break out of our comfort zone, and anyway, Jackie Collins has been dead for years.

I’m out on the streets because of a news story that scraped the sides of the English media this week, but literally set the Thai online world on fire for a good two or three days — an eternity in this era of flash-inthe-pan collective attention spans.

Look, I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I’ve certainly said and done my share of stupid things in my life. Some have occurred right here on this page. I call them “What was I thinking?” moments. As I tell my students, doing stupid things is part of being human and one doesn’t have to be too harsh on oneself afterwards, as long as one learns a lesson from the indiscretion and doesn’t repeat it. I know — do as I say, not as I do.

I say all this because what happened up in Nakhon Ratchasima last week was truly one of those moments where you ask: “What were they thinking?” It involves the Thai cops embarking on a sting that left us wondering whether we should quietly remove the word “Thai” and replace it with “Keystone”.

Copyright infringement has always been a major problem in this country. It used to be way, way worse. Back in the olden days, Sukhumvit and Patpong were awash with fake goods. It’s what tourists came to Thailand for, among other things. Cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, Rolex watches and Nike shirts were piled up on street stalls.

It was just two years ago that Thailand was removed from the Priority Watch List issued by the Office of the United States Trade Representative which identifies countries where copyright is not taken as seriously as it should be. We weren’t completely removed … Thailand just lost the Priority part and was “upgraded” to the Watch List, meaning things still aren’t that great.

But it’s better than it used to be. The Thai government and police got tough on copyrighted goods some 10-15 years ago. Exactly one year ago a new government centre was launched to fight intellectual property infringements, especially online.

That’s because so much of that infringement has, like life, moved online. Every night, around the time I’m with Jackie Collins, young Thais settle down in front of their devices to watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters on websites that have names like Doonung (Watch A Movie). The movies have been translated into Thai and are completely free, the websites powered by advertising.

One can imagine the movie industry is losing millions of baht each week from this alone.

Police are under a lot of pressure to stamp this kind of thing out … perhaps that’s why this week they stormed the house of a criminal in Korat who was making blatant rip-offs of copyrighted images. The criminal in question was arrested and police quickly slapped the miscreant with a 50,000 baht fine.

Normally in such high-profile cases the police hold a press conference and parade the criminal in front of the TV cameras. With puffed-out chests, they narrate the chain of events in the investigation that led to the criminal’s capture. Only this time they chose to skip that PR activity. I would have, too, if I had been them.

You see, the criminal was a 15-year-old schoolgirl. Nong Ohm was making krathong, those little floating objects used for tomorrow’s Loy Krathong festival. She made them out of bread so that they were environmentally friendly, and sold them for 17 baht apiece.

Any money she made out of the little venture was to go to supplementing her education, since her father was a poor factory worker.

So when a customer called in an order for 136 krathong, Nong Ohm was over the moon. The customer specifically asked her to make them featuring the faces of famous cartoon characters such as Garfield and Angry Birds.

She got to work, and had 30 of them made when the cops swooped on her home in downtown Korat. How did they know about the illegal order?

The cops had phoned in the order themselves.

This is one of those moments where I’d have given anything to be a fly on the wall during the meeting at Nakhon Ratchasima police station the day it was decided to ignore all other flagrant copyright infringements, such as billion-baht pirated-movie industries, and go for a 15-year-old girl instead. Who thought it would be really good to go undercover and order Angry Bird krathong from her, then arrest her and demand a 50,000 baht fine? Had it been a long, fruitless day at the station? Was it too difficult to catch online pirates? Were they drunk?

When the news erupted, it caused a storm. The Korat police quickly came out to defend themselves, saying it had been a joint operation with copyright agents. That led to the copyright agents quickly coming out publicly to deny any knowledge of the debacle.

Ironically, the poor girl didn’t even use the entire characters’ faces on her krathong. She just used the eyes — the intense angry frown of the Angry Birds. What does that mean? We can’t draw pictures of angry eyes any longer for fear of litigation from the Angry Birds copyright holder? Who plays Angry Birds in 2019 anyway? That’s as passé as Jackie Collins!

There is an even murkier aspect to this story, in that Nong Ohm’s grandfather is a retired cop, and he managed to negotiate the fine down to 5,000 baht. That in itself surely caused that robbed lady holding the scales of justice to frown like an Angry Bird.

It took a lawyer from the Help Crime Victim Club to say what was on everybody’s lips — the real crime here was not infringement of copyright, but rather entrapment and extortion.

So that’s why I am standing amid the crowds of Sukhumvit Road, an hour away from midnight. I just wanted to find out if, indeed, the copyright situation in Thailand is so under-control now, there is nothing left to do but coerce a poor high-school girl shaping bread into krathong to pay for her education.

Ah yes, there’s the Rolex watch man. He’s still here. And there’s a deaf guy selling Led Zeppelin T-shirts. The DVD guy says I have to wait 10 minutes while he goes and gets Joker for me. And everywhere I go, copyrighted music is blaring out of restaurant loudspeakers and pubs.

I’ve had enough. I’ve found my evidence. I’m going home to snuggle up in bed with the latest Hollywood blockbuster on Doonung. But I won’t be buying any Angry Bird krathong tomorrow. No sirree! I have my standards, you know.