NAPOLEON said the British were a nation of shopkeepers. Today, the Brits are a knock-off nation of stallholders and market shoppers. The Sunday morning market at Wembley is bristling: 500 stalls in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. Between 9am and 3pm, tens of thousands of shoppers gather to buy clothes, sportswear, household goods — and especially CDs and DVDs. Perhaps one stall in five is selling films or music. Almost every one is offering counterfeits.

“It’s moved on from the people who did a bit of counterfeit on the side,” says Giles Speid, the principal trading standards enforcement officer at the London boroughs of Brent and Harrow trading standards service. “In the ten weeks leading up to Christmas, apart from the food stalls, we’re talking about 90 per cent of the market being knock-off stuff.”

Speid spots a market stall with a small mountain of pirate DVDs. “What have we here, gentlemen?” he asks, quickly taking the stall over with his body language. Having “front” is essential for avoiding trouble; that, and the stab vests that he and his colleague Mohammed Tariq — a trading standards officer from Birmingham on secondment in London — wear when they raid markets.

Today’s raid has an unexpected bonus. As Mohammed — an expert in Bollywood cinema — sorts through the bounty and finds at least three films that opened in Asian cinemas less than 48 hours previously, Speid lifts the tarpaulin at the back of the market stall. Behind it four customers freeze, caught in the equivalent of a speakeasy. Speid has discovered a secret stall-within-a-stall. It has £5 copies of Hollywood films, one of which still hadn’t opened in UK cinemas and most of which are still showing.

“Can I still buy this one?” a confused customer asks Speid, holding a knock-off DVD out as the two of them bundle the entire stock into a giant plastic bag on the market stall.

As the two enforcement officers stroll through the market with the proceeds of their raid, which will be logged and recycled (counterfeit CDs and DVDs become polystyrene cups), word is going round. “I can’t serve you,” says one trader, swiftly sweeping his stock into a brown cardboard box. “The trading standards are here.” In fact, the trading standards are looking over the customer’s shoulder. Mohammed listens to the shouts in Punjabi that bounce from stall to stall, warning traders to hide their stock. “They don't know I understand,” he laughs.

At another music and film stall, Mohammed lifts the cloth that covers the table on the next-door clothing stall. Underneath are at least 1,000 fake discs in an untidy pile. The market trader acts surprised, giving a “how-did-they-get-there?” look. But today is his lucky day: the enforcers literally have their hands full with the heavy bag of discs they confiscated from the speakeasy. It’s the weight they can carry — and the people available to do it — that often dictates the extent of a raid, Speid admits. “Last time, we took six vans plus police vehicles, and by one o’clock they were all full.”

The market traders call counterfeits “snide”. “If I couldn’t sell snide I’d be back to painting and decorating,” says Ricky Jones, whose stall occupies five times the space of most of his competitors. He tried selling CDs and DVDs, but the variable quality made him move into knock-off sportswear instead. Speid respects Jones because every time he raids, Jones asks his staff to help Speid bag up the goods he’s about to confiscate. The two have a grudging respect.

As we talk, some of the market security staff — whose job should be to enforce legal trading — are on their walkie-talkies, warning the stallholders at the other end of the market. The stallholders pay an informal tax to some of those in the security to do this, says Speid.

Increasingly car-boot sales offer yet another route to the market for knock-offs, especially CDs and DVDs. The British Film Council estimates that there are 60 million in circulation and, even though police and trading standards confiscated one million DVDs alone in 2004, the lost sales are already at £500 million for law-abiding British shopkeepers.

For 30 years, the British Phonographic Industry Limited, better known as the BPI, has been battling the counterfeiters. As David Martin, the BPI’s director of antipiracy, points out, the growth in counterfeiting in the UK is six times faster than the growth in the legal music market.

“Our biggest problem today isn’t imported pirate CDs,” says Martin. “Today we have to go after a guy making five CDs a week as well as a guy making 10,000 a week. In 1993, when I joined the BPI, there were 12 major cassette counterfeiting factories in the UK and we knew exactly where they were. In 2005, those 12 have become about 100,000 CD factories.

The knock-off business is tempting even for people who already have a legitimate business. Jayanti Amarishi Buhecha was one of them. When police raided his Bollywood film distribution business based in Cambridge, they found 18,000 cheap counterfeit discs. In February 2005, he received a three-year sentence in Harrow Crown Court, to Mohammed's delight. But he was soon brought down to Earth. “I walked out of the court after the Buhecha case, and went to get a sandwich. I was stopped in the street by a Chinese woman who wanted to sell me counterfeit DVDs,” he says.

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