Pirates feast on bootleg films and CDs

Officials tackling the $7 billion DVD and CD piracy problem are keeping an eye on South Florida

Some in the entertainment industry don't consider bootlegging to be all bad.



Alfred Spellman, producer of the acclaimed 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys, billed as the true story of incidents that inspired Scarface and the 1980s TV series Miami Vice, says he was shocked to learn how many people in South Florida had pirated copies of his documentary before it was even released to the public.



Spellman responded with a second documentary, a video titled Streets of Miami about the bootlegging of Cocaine Cowboys, and posted it straight to the video-sharing site YouTube.



''Cocaine Cowboys premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2006,'' Spellman says. 'We were in the middle of another project, and people were coming up to us saying, `Hey, I saw your movie.' ''



``We said, how? And people would get bashful and embarrassed and not want to say. Eventually, we were able to trace a copy to the Carol City Flea Market, and we actually met the guys who were selling bootlegged copies of our movie!''



Spellman says he also found barbershops, corner stores and even royalty in Miami's hip-hop community -- like superproducers Cool and Dre and rappers Trick Daddy and DJ Khaled -- in possession of illegal copies of Cocaine Cowboys.



`WE EMBRACED IT'



''We had a choice,'' Spellman says. ``We could get angry about it or we could embrace it. We embraced it. Bootlegging has been happening in the hip-hop industry for years. And it has worked for a lot of artists. It has built fan bases and careers.



``We figured the real fans would want to purchase the official version, because it contained extra footage, bonus tracks, things like that. We were right. To date, we've sold 100,000 legitimate DVDs of our film.



``Bootlegging helped us. . . . The biggest challenge for small filmmakers like us isn't piracy, it's anonymity. And as long as we're being bootlegged, that's not a problem.''

The Associated Press and the Documentary Blog wrote about the bootlegging of Cocaine Cowboys last year.