Once upon a time, cash-strapped cinephiles used to get their fix courtesy friendly neighbourhood VCR stores. VCR, for the benefit of millennials, stands for Video Cassette Recorder. The digital invasion brought along pirated CDs and, later, pirated DVDs. For Delhiites, getting their hands on such illicit forms of entertainment meant going underground – literally, if you were going to Palika Bazaar.

However, the times they are a-changing, as the Crime Branch of the national capital’s police force realised on Wednesday night. In simultaneous raids carried out across the city, Delhi Police arrested nine persons accused of movie piracy. Yet despite disks being seized from six different locations – Old Seemapuri, Kotla Mubarakpur, Malviya Nagar, Tughlakabad Extension and two shops in Chandni Chowk’s Lajpat Rai Market – the total number of DVDs confiscated was just 355. That’s less than 60 DVDs at each location.

This, according to Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ravindra Yadav, points to a new modus operandi of the pirates: latest movies are kept on laptops or desktops, from which it is transferred onto the customers’ pen drives. “Depending on how desperate the customer seems to be, anything between Rs 50 and Rs 100 is charged,” Yadav told reporters at a press briefing on Thursday.

While several movies – releases both recent and/or pornographic – were found, the upcoming feature film whose leak led to the raids was Great Grand Masti. Originally slated for July 22, its release has been brought forward by a week to July 15 after a high-definition print of the movie was leaked online. For the third time in as many months, a film’s censor copy made it to the internet – it was Sairat, the highest grossing Marathi film of all time, in May and last month, it was the controversial Udta Punjab. Soon after Great Grand Masti, Sultan too leaked online. Incidentally, both Udta Punjab and Great Grand Masti have the same co-producers – Balaji Telefilms. In fact, it was Balaji’s complaint on which the Delhi Police had acted.

Yadav refused to comment on whether the copy was leaked from the censor board, but regardless of where the leak originated, it seems Bollywood is facing a crisis similar to what the music industry did at the turn of the millennium. It is trying to plug leaks using encryption and meanwhile, the police is unsure how to handle torrent uploads if the server is in a foreign land. Perhaps some filmmakers will take a leaf out of Radiohead’s book and adopt a ‘pay what you like’ model across various platforms including the internet in a bid to combat piracy. In the long run, that might even lead to more quality and less Great Grand Masti. Leak or no leak, we know what to expect from this film.