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14 Nabbed In Huge Spanish Piracy Raid

By Howell Llewellyn, Madrid
Publication: Billboard Bulletin
Date: Monday, July 7 2003
Spanish police arrested 14 people in a major anti-piracy raid last week in Barcelona. The raid was at the premises of Grupo CD World, a company that allegedly supplied pirates with specially designed software and hardware that can neutralize copy-protection mechanisms.

Police--aided

by experts from the IFPI, labels body AFYVE and authors and publishers society SGAE--seized 950 CD-R devices capable of making 600 copies a minute, and nearly 500,000 blank discs.

AFYVE says one in three of all CD-Rs used to illegally copy CDs last year in Spain bore the Rimax trademark, which belongs to Grupo CD World. According to the trade group, the company is the biggest distributor of illegal CD-Rs worldwide, and sold more than 11 million pirated CDs and DVDs in 2002 alone.

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