The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is a unit of the City of London Police, the national lead force for fraud. It was established in 2013[1] with the responsibility to investigate and deter serious and organised intellectual property crime in the United Kingdom.
It is based in City of London Police's headquarters at Guildhall Yard East. The unit consists of 19 police officers and staff, including detectives and police staff investigators.
Part of PIPCU's remit[2] is to protect consumers from harm, focusing on intellectual property crime that has public safety implications. Since its inception, it has investigated intellectual property crime worth more than £100 million concerning counterfeit goods or digital piracy, and suspended 28,000 websites[3] selling counterfeit goods. These websites have also been linked to identity theft.
History
The operationally-independent unit was launched in September 2013[4] with funding from the UK government's Intellectual Property Office. It was announced in August 2017 that PIPCU will receive a further £3.2 million from the IPO to fund the unit to June 2019.[5]
In 2013, the unit began Operation Creative to disrupt and prevent websites from providing unauthorised access to copyrighted content in partnership with the creative and advertising industries. Rights holders in the creative industries can report copyright infringing websites to PIPCU, providing a detailed package of evidence indicating how the site is involved in illegal copyright infringement. Research has shown that there has been a 64% decrease in advertising[6] from the UK's top advertising spending companies on copyright infringing websites and an 87% drop in adverts for licensed gambling operators[7] being displayed on illegal sites that infringe copyright.
In 2013, Operation Ashiko was created to targets the sale of online physical counterfeit goods and aims to seize the domains of infringers.[8]
In April 2017, PIPCU launched the IP Crime Directory,[9] a database for customs and police officers to help them identify counterfeit goods with the information uploaded by rights and brand holders.[10]
Operation Creative
Operation Creative, formerly Operation Trade Bridge,[11] is an ongoing campaign against alleged copyright infringing sites and their advertising network. A number of torrent and streaming sites have been either shut down, had their domains seized or threatened by the PIPCU. Whilst over 100 websites have been 'dealt with',[12] the majority of domain name suspension requests are denied.[13]
In response to the new round of web blocking in the UK in conjunction with the copyright infringing site blocking programmes, a service called Immunicity was launched.[37] to allow circumvention of both blocking types. However on 6 August 2014 the owner was arrested[38] by the PIPCU under anti-fraud legislation.[39] Anti-censorship supporters created clones of the site such as Immun.es[23] (which closed down shortly after launching) and routingpacketsisnotacrime.uk[40] to resurrect the service.
By August 2015 the immunicity domain was back under the control of anti-censorship activists and displays a website inviting people to use Tor and other anonymity services.
Infringing website list
PIPCU maintains an 'Infringing Website List' (IWL), a portal for digital advertisers to be informed of sites containing infringing content with the intention that they cease advertising on them.[41] Sites are identified as infringing by rights holders and the list is not made available to the public.[42] As of 12 August a freedom of information request from TorrentFreak revealed:[43]
74 domains are subject to the advertiser blocking programme, of which of October 2014 only 2 domains[44] had ever been removed from the list. 83 advertising companies with a UK presence are currently participating.
Working with the media and advertiser industry body, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) created a technology portal called 'Project Sunblock'.[45] If PIPCU do not receive a response from the website operators, the host or registrar[12] of an allegedly infringing site, the site is added to the IWL via the Sunblock portal, which is then passed along to participating advertising networks for blacklisting. From June 2014 this technology allowed replacing the adverts of websites believed to be offering unauthorized content with warnings from PIPCU.[46]
Piracy warning replacing adverts
In 2014 the PIPCU removed payment provisions from 4,650 offending sites with a .co.uk address from sites on the infringing websites list.[47]
