KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA - MALAYSIA will launch the world's first anti-piracy canine unit to fight compact disc piracy, an industry watchdog said on Friday.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) said it had donated the two Labradors, Paddy and Manny, to the ministry of domestic and consumer affairs and they would make their first public appearance on Monday when they would be used to sniff out CDs and DVDs.

'Malaysia is the first country to take up the challenge to test the capability of working dogs and we have discovered that using dogs to battle piracy can greatly assist enforcement efforts,' a senior industry official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

Last year, two black Labradors, Lucky and Flo, were brought in by the US-based MPA which investigates piracy for major movie companies.

The pair, who were not part of a specific unit, were so successful that piracy syndicates placed a bounty on their heads.

They helped Malaysia sniff out fake music and movie discs worth millions of ringgit.

'Paddy and Manny will now have to live up to their seniors' reputation,' the official said.

The new dogs are trained to detect polycarbonate and other chemicals used in optical discs. They either freeze or sit when they sniff the chemicals.

Losses to the MPA studios due to worldwide Internet piracy amounted to 6.1 billion dollars (S$8.5 billion) in 2005.

Of that, about 2.4 billion dollars was lost to bootlegging, 1.4 billion to illegal copying and 2.3 billion to Internet piracy.

As a regional breakdown, approximately 1.2 billion dollars were losses from piracy across the Asia-Pacific, while the US accounted for 1.3 billion. -- AFP