Knight Ridder Newspapers

NEW YORK – The dark side of the DVD counterfeiting industry felt the force of the NYPD on Friday when police officers seized 1,000 pirated copies of “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” just 36 hours after its debut.

The illegal DVDs, selling for less than half the price of a movie ticket, were stacked nearly to the ceiling of a Harlem storage facility, alongside 40,000 other illegal disks.

Nine men were arrested during the raid, which came as bootlegged copies of the final “Star Wars” film were being sold on the streets – and online – at a remarkable pace.

“The street vendors knew to come here to pick up the DVDs,” said NYPD Deputy Inspector Kevin Walsh, who oversaw the raid at self-storage facility, after nabbing several peddlers in the Bronx.

Billions of dollars in profits are bled out of the motion-picture industry by the counterfeit sales, authorities said.

Mere hours after the film’s premiere, counterfeit DVDs materialized in Chinatown, said Kori Bernards, spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America.

“It’s stealing. It’s plain and simple theft,” Bernards said. “If people keep stealing our movies, we’re not going to be able to make them.”

A New Daily News reporter had no trouble scoring several new releases, including “Episode III,” for $5 a pop in a subway tunnel below Times Square. The cost of a movie ticket at most theaters in Manhattan is at least $10.

The MPAA estimates movie companies lose more than $3.5 billion in revenue each year because of counterfeit DVDs.

A Smith Barney study put the figure even higher, saying Internet sites that allow fans to illegally download movies and pirated DVDs cost the industry $5.4 billion a year.

But the studios and police are fighting back, seizing more than 76 million illegal disks last year.

Movie fans who purchase the illegal DVDs are giving their cash to criminals, some of whom run international human trafficking and prostitution rings, said Marc Raimondi of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.

“We’re not talking about a mom-and-pop organization making these in some basement. It’s an organized criminal element,” Raimondi said. “People who think counterfeit items are a victimless crime are sorely misinformed.”