By Nwabueze Okonkwo

ONITSHA—Five suspected music pirates were yesterday arrested by officials of the Nigerian Copyright Commission, NCC, at the popular Emeka Offor Plaza, a GSM phone market located at Onitsha Main Market, during an anti-piracy operation in the commercial city.

Among the items recovered from the suspects included seven laptops, packets of memory cards and other accessories suspected to have contained musical platforms already loaded into the system by the pirates for selling of assorted types of music into their customers’ memory cards for MP3 players through download.

The anti-piracy operation, led by NCC’s Director of Enforcement, Augustine Amodu and assisted by the Onitsha Zonal Director, Emeka Ogbonna, was prompted by complaints by members of the Musical Products Dealers Association of Nigeria, MPDAN.

Apparently acting on information, the NCC officials, accompanied by a team of soldiers and policemen as security backup, stormed the plaza and apprehended the five suspects right inside a particular shop believed to be the control tower for all the MP3 music loaders within the plaza.

However, efforts by the NCC officials to go for more arrests proved abortive as they quickly jumped into their waiting vehicles and returned to their office.as soon as they discovered that some of the traders had already started encircling them gradually in an apparent move to launch an attack against them inside the market.

Parading the suspects at the NCC zonal office in Onitsha shortly on arrival, Amodu who identified MP3 player as a copyright infringement, lamented that the Nigerian music industry has gone into abyss since the advent of MP3.

Amodu noted that the Director-General of NCC, Mr. Afam Ezekude had given an outright directive that all the music pirates who download peoples’ musical and film works into MP3, audio and video plates and sell to customers should be arrested and prosecuted with immediate effect.

He therefore warned the general public to stop patronizing the MP3 music loaders and movies pirates who eat illegally from the sweat of music and film artistes after toiling day and night to produce their works, adding that the suspects would be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted if  primafacie  case is established against them.

He also warned that NCC would soon go after commercial and private vehicle owners who patronize the pirates by using MP3 in their vehicles.

In their speeches, the state chairman of MPDAN, Peter Obimdike and the National Chief Task Force Officer of MPDAN, Inyiama Stephen Chinedu, lamented that after spending sleepless nights and huge sums of money ranging from N3 million, N7 million and N10 million as the case may be to produce music or film, these pirates would just sit by the roadside, buy only a plate, download it into their system and start selling it to millions of music lovers and making the money at the expense of the artistes and producers.

They contended that as music and film producers, the artistes, after hearing their music inside private vehicles, tricycles, taxis and other public transport systems, they would start accusing them (producers) of selling their music and refusing to pay them (artistes) and the producers would be denying, only to find out that those who are actually instrumental to the distribution of the music and making their millions from it are the pirates, while the artistes and producers go hungry and frustrated.

They therefore commended the Director-General of NCC, Ezekude for devoting his time to fight the pirates to a standstill and urged him not to relent until they are flushed out in its entirely or their nefarious activities brought to a barest minimum.

Three of the suspects who identified himself as John Oko, Emego Chijioke and Okafor Chukwunonso, told newsmen that they were not into music piracy or Mp3 music loading, as alleged by the NCC officials but into phone assessories and flashing, adding that some of them were not even based in Onitsha, but were in Onitsha to buy phone assessories.