U.K. POLICE PIRACY UNIT GETS NEW GOVERNMENT FUNDING

The British government has given City of London Police £2.5 million ($3.8 million) to fund its newly created Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, British Culture Secretary Sajid Javid told a meeting of the British Phonographic Industry on Tuesday. “The first unit of its kind in the world, PIPCU is working with industry groups — including the BPI — on the Infringing Websites List,” Javid said, indicating that the list may include such traditional search-engine websites as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. He said that he had asked those three sites “to work with you to stop search results sending people to illegal sites. … And let me be perfectly clear: if we don’t see real progress, we will be looking at a legislative approach.” Responding to reports that millions of users are illegally downloading copyrighted content and that it is futile to attempt to attempt to halt the activity, Javid said, “I don’t agree,” adding, “We don’t look at any other crimes and say ‘It’s such a big problem that it’s not worth bothering with.’ We wouldn’t stand idly by if paintings worth hundreds of millions of pounds were being stolen from the National Gallery. Copyright infringement is theft, pure and simple. And it’s vital we try to reduce it.”