Hong Kong customs has raided 31 party rooms and a restaurant where it alleges karaoke songs have been played with online streaming activity illegally.

The use of the songs allegedly infringes copyright. As a result of the raids, customs seized HK$1.1 million ($140,817) of IT hardware and streaming equipment, reports the South China Morning Post.

“With the summer holiday beginning in July, we discovered party rooms and restaurants that provided karaoke songs for customers that infringed copyright law,” said Shek Ka-yin, divisional commander for intellectual property technology crime investigation.

“People involved in the case put efforts into setting up a remote data center to hide machines that stored infringing karaoke songs, with the purpose of evading [the] customs’ investigation and increasing the difficulty of discovery.”

According to Shek, this was the first time that a karaoke-related copyright infringement case had involved online streaming technology.

After raiding one data center in Causeway Bay, five song players and several network devices were seized. The song players streamed music to screens in party rooms, though the karaoke machines remained remote.

In total, 39 players containing 1.8 million karaoke songs were seized, four video game consoles with suspected pirated games, and a batch of audio and video equipment and network hardware.

Eleven men and seven women were arrested as a result of the raids. The owners had previously had licenses that allowed them to stream karaoke at the venues, but these expired one and a half years ago.

The maximum penalty for infringing the Copyright Ordinance is a HK$50,000 (US$6,400) fine per infringing copy and four years imprisonment, while a breach of the Trade Descriptions Ordinance faces a maximum fine of HK$500,000 (US$64,000) and five years imprisonment.

In 2023, Dutch police took down a pirate Internet protocol television operation during a raid of a data center in Den Helder.

In 2022, Spanish police were surprised when, during a raid of what they thought was an indoor marijuana plantation, they found an illegal cryptomining operation.