In emerging markets, where profitable online business models take time to develop, big companies are still exposed to lose billions in revenuesWhen Mexican police raided some suspicious warehouses in Mexico City in May, they were not going after cocaine laboratories or marijuana farms. Instead they uncovered an enormous media counterfeiting operation, seizing 1,000 DVD burners, 12 tonnes of blank discs and thousands of copies of Hollywood movies and computer programs.The raid was a victory for local law enforcement in a nation that is one of the largest producers and consumers of pirated goods. But it also highlights the evolving nature of the threat to media and software groups: while police may have seized thousands of discs, piracy in emerging economies is shifting to the web, where an ever-faster internet has made it increasingly simple to download movies, music and software illegally.For more than a decade, big media and technology groups have been grappling with global piracy. What began in the 1990s as a trickle of copied films captured with camcorders became a torrent of counterfeit discs as cheap DVD players and copiers flooded the market in the 2000s. With high-speed internet becoming accessible around the world, it is increasingly simple for anyone with a computer to download illicit, high-quality versions of virtually any music, film or software.
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