A few years back, John Malcolm, the Motion Picture Association of America's anti-piracy director, was brainstorming new ways to combat piracy. Fresh on the job after serving as a federal prosecutor and a Justice Department attorney, Malcolm wanted to expand the group's efforts beyond public relations campaigns and federal lawsuits.

That's when it occurred to him: Why not enlist man's best friend in the war on piracy?

Renowned dog trainer, Nial Powell, trained Lucky and Flo, the world's first dogs to decipher the smell of polycarbonates used in DVDs. The dogs have discovered millions of pirated discs worldwide, and have been responsible for the arrests of dozens of people.

Photo: Courtesy of MPAA "I spent a lot of my career as a prosecutor. I had worked with agents, the DEA, the ATF. I was familiar with dogs that sniffed out drugs and bombs and cadaver dogs," Malcolm said. "I knew dogs were remarkably talented, that they could sniff out all kinds of things. Dogs have a sense of smell that is roughly 40 times that of a human being."

Fast-forward to today. Malcolm's late-2004 vision has become reality, and the movie industry's specially trained dogs, Lucky and Flo, are ferreting out counterfeit DVDs in piracy hotspots around the globe. Trained to sniff out the polycarbonate used in DVDs, the two black Labrador retrievers have recovered millions of pirated discs, and collared dozens of counterfeiters in the United States, the Czech Republic, Malaysia and elsewhere. In Malaysia, professional counterfeiters are believed to have placed a cash bounty on the heads of the disc-sniffing canines.

The dogs illustrate the lengths to which the MPAA is going in search of new and less-controversial tools to combat piracy, which the movie studios' lobbying arm claims costs them billions in lost revenue every year. The MPAA's previous efforts to battle copyright infringement have raised eyebrows. In 2005, the Los Angeles-based group paid a hacker $15,000 for stolen internal records about TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent search engine that went defunct under the weight of an MPAA lawsuit. And tricks like poisoning BitTorrent tracker sites with fake seeds have been likened to denial-of-service attacks by critics.

But who doesn't like dogs?

"This is one effort that very few people will take umbrage at for what we're doing," Malcolm said. "This certainly has been one of our more successful ventures."

The MPAA has toured Lucky and Flo around the world as part of a public relations campaign to bring attention to piracy. The local and international press has lapped up the traveling dog shows. Meanwhile, the tangible results produced by the canine copyright cops have sparked the interest of international law enforcement agencies. On Wednesday, the Portuguese government announced it had just trained a dog to find DVDs. South Africa is expected soon to announce its own disc-sniffing K-9 unit. The MPAA anticipates more governments will follow.

"We undertook this just as an experiment," Malcolm said. "We didn't know if it would work. Lo-and-behold, it did."

John Malcolm, the MPAA anti-piracy chief, envisioned a PR-friendly way to battle piracy: Train cute dogs to sniff out DVDs.

Photo: Courtesy of MPAA. The dogs are most-often trotted out when authorities already suspect a warehouse or storefront is hiding an underground disc-duplication operation or large caches of discs. One of the dogs – accompanied by his MPAA handler – tags along when police raid the location, then guides the investigators to back rooms and hidden compartments where pirated discs are hiding. The canines have also helped police find duplication labs in the first place, sniffing around a suspect neighborhood for the scent of DVDs.

In Malaysia, the world's first two disc-sniffing pooches, Lucky and Flo, have assisted in at least 35 raids, leading to the arrest of 26 people and the discovery of about 1.9 million pirated discs and 97 burner towers, the MPAA said. Last year, three alleged pirates in New York were arrested after Lucky and Flo were alerted to dozens of boxes holding unauthorized discs at retail outlets in the Jamaica section of Queens.

A yellow Labrador retriever named Manny, an MPAA-trained disc-sniffer, diedlast month in Malaysia at the age of 1. The MPAA is awaiting an autopsy report, but suspects the dog might have been murdered.

"Word on the streets," Malcolm said, was that disc-counterfeiting groups had put out a hit on the disc-sniffing pooches.

"We heard from enough people, we took it as a threat," Malcolm said. "We are very interested in getting the autopsy report. We are very concerned. I'm not looking to cast aspersions. But Manny all of a sudden died."

To train the dogs for their mission, the MPAA turned to respected dog-whisperer Nial Powell, chairman of the Search and Rescue Dog Association of Ireland North. His research on how to train dogs to recover underwater drowning victims is the protocol of choice for the British Institute of Professional Dog Trainers.

Powell, of Newcastle, Ireland, has taught dogs to find luckless, dead climbers on mountaintops, and to recover those killed in airline disasters, earthquakes and fires.

Training dogs to find DVDs required some creativity.

"I thought, 'Well, there's a challenge,'" Powell said in a recent telephone interview "The long and the short of it is that I discovered the dogs could detect the odor of DVDs. I tested to make sure it wasn't the packaging or the stickers. It was the actual polycarbonate material."

"I love the challenge of trying to teach a dog something different," he said.

Powell's experience with canines has left him with an abiding faith in their sleuthing ability. Following the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 air disaster – when the plane was bombed and its remains rained down on Lockerbie, in southern Scotland – Powell went there with a border collie named Pepper.

"Pepper disappeared under this wall and came out with an arm in his mouth. I thought 'Holy mother of God,'" Powell said. "We spent five days there doing that." Before he was done, Pepper had uncovered the remains of 16 people, he said.

Powell has had similar experiences searching for the dead in the aftermath of earthquakes in Algiers and Turkey. With the right dog, he said, "you can teach it to do anything, within reason."

"I would select a dog on the basis of its desire to play," he said. "Obviously, the dog needs to be safe around people,".

He said it took about six months to train Lucky and Flo, the world's first disc-sniffing dogs. The MPAA estimates it paid about $18,000 for both dogs.

The key to success is to get the dog to believe its task at hand equates with recovering a tennis ball, Powell said.

"What makes a dog work for me is a tennis ball. If the dog does what I want it to do, it gets a tennis ball," he said. "If it doesn't do what I want it to do, it doesn’t get a tennis ball."

For underwater retrievals, the dog "thinks the victim has got a tennis ball and wants to bring it back from underneath the boat," Powell said. "It's all because the guy underwater has got a ball."

The same applies to DVDs, he said.

"You teach the dog to associate the odor of a DVD with a reward," he said. "Once the dog associates that odor for that reward, he's willing to search for that odor anywhere. "

Most important, he said, "The dog must not know where the reward is coming from. If it knows it's coming from you, the dog won't work for it. The ball must appear by magic to the dog."

For all their skill, the canines suffer some serious limitations. For one, the dogs cannot decipher the difference between pirated and authentic DVDs. So far, at least, there have been no reports of innocent movie fans being fingered by the pooches, but the possibility lingers over the whole operation.

Powell thinks he can solve that problem. Some day, he might be able to train his dogs to alert on subtle chemical differences between authorized DVDs and the cheaper knockoffs produced by crooks. "I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility," he said.

Another obvious problem: The canines are great at locating physical discs, but are of little help in catching pirated downloads. Until a dog comes along that can sniff out a BitTorrent transfer of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, the MPAA says it won't be abandoning its controversial programs of litigation and peer-to-peer sabotage – even if those efforts are less warm-and-fuzzy.