By Baiju NT [ January 06, 2010 ]
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Kollywood condemns video piracy of Jaggubhai

In the backdrop of a recently-found illegal distribution of actor Sarathkumar's yet-to-be-released Tamil film Jaggubhai over the Internet, actors, including Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, and technicians of Kollywood convened a meeting at the Four Frames preview theatre in Chennai to discuss their views to curtail the illegal activities and condemned the video piracy of Jaggubhai, which will be coming to theatres this Pongal.

The uploaded version, which has no background music, has been converted to CDs which are freely available on the streets of some neighbouring states, it is said. According to those associated with the film, even the re-recording and trimming of the movie were not complete.

"It’s murder. It nearly took Rs. 15 crores to produce this film and involved two years of hard work. But I am not able to withstand the cruel deed of those heartless people,” the film's director K.S. Ravikumar said.

Rajinikanth assured the Jaggubhai team that people would come to cinemas to watch the movie. "Do not worry. Treat this as publicity for the movie. Even if you spend Rs. 10 crore, you will not be able to get this kind of publicity," he said. “We need to think about what we can do to prevent such events from happening, We have to realise that people will buy a DVD or CD if it is available in every road junction. We have to make them realise that when they buy such a DVD or CD, the money they give for such a purchase becomes black money," Kamal Haasan said.

Meanwhile, following instructions from Chief Minister Karunanidhi, raids were carried out all over Tamil Nadu by a joint action team, headed by Central Crime Branch Deputy Commissioner C. Sridhar. A 26-year-old Coimbatore based man and a Chennai based person have been arrested for uploading to the Internet and copying the film to DVDs. Police recovered nearly 10,000 copies of the DVDs of the pirated film.