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The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit is a specialized unit of the City of London Police, established in 2013 specialising in intellectual property related law enforcement.
Contents
History
Since at least 2011 the BPI had built close ties with the City of London Police's National Fraud Intelligence Bureau as well as advertising agencies to remove payment channels from copyright infringement sites. The dedicated unit itself was first announced in December 2012 by Vince Cable MP. It was funded by £2.5m over two years of public money via the Intellectual Property Office. and became operational in September 2013. In April 2014 Mike Weatherley, the Prime Minister's Intellectual Property Advisor called on the Prime Minister to commit to the permanent funding of the unit to extend its existence beyond 2015. In October 2014 additional funding was revived to operate until 2017.
Staffing
The unit is a 21 strong-team consisting of detectives, police staff investigators, analysts, researchers, an education officer and a communications officer.
The team previous had the expertise from industry secondees including a Senior Intelligence Officer from the IPO until January 2015, and a Senior Internet Investigator from the BPI until October 2014
The unit formally headed up by T/DCI Andy Fyfe and of October 2014 is run by DCI Danny Medlycott.
Operation Creative
Operation Creative, formally entitled Operation Trade Bridge, 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', the majority of domain name suspension requests are denied. In June 2014 at the International IP Enforcement Summit, the PIPCU claimed:
The new legislation that’s necessary is not just about prosecuting people and protecting people, we’ve got to think about some of the enabling functions that allow this to happen that we just take for granted. Whether it’s Bitnet, The Tor – which is 90% of the Internet – peer-to-peer sharing, or the streaming capability worldwide. At what point does civil society say that as well as the benefits that brings, this enables huge risk and threat to our society that we need to take action against?
A freedom of information request seeking clarification into the "90%" figure revealed there was no underlying data behind this figure but instead it had been 'raised in dialogue' in a question and answer session.
Operations
In December 2015 they arrested a karaoke subtitle creation gang.
Suspended domains
A common suspension page is used at 83.138.166.114 describing the domain as being under criminal investigation, featuring links to: Pro Music, Music Matters, FindAnyFilm.com, The Content Map, British Phonographic Industry, FACT, IFPI and The Publishers Association
As of 22 September 2014, 29 domains are pointed to this page. Sites suspended with webhost cooperation use a hosted version of the same page.
According to freedom of information requests, the contents of the suspension page are 'recommended by operation stakeholders' who are the BPI, IFPI, The Publishers Association and FACT.
By August 2015, 317 domain suspension requests had been issued.
EasyDNS
In October 2013 a request to Canadian registrar EasyDNS requested they redirect torrentpond.com to an IP address controlled by the PIPCU.
This request was refused due to having no legal basis. EasyDNS suggested that registrars that complied with the PIPCU's requests may have violated ICANN's transfer policies. and filed a request for enforcement with ICANN. Following this request, three domains suspended by Public Domain Registry were ordered to be transferred to EasyDNS.
Immunicity arrest
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. to allow circumvention of both blocking types. However on August 6, 2014 the owner was arrested by the PIPCU under anti-fraud legislation. Anti-censorship supporters created clones of the site such as Immun.es (which closed down shortly after launching) and routingpacketsisnotacrime.uk 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
The 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. Sites are identified as infringing by rights holders and the list is not made available to the public. As of August 12, a freedom of information request from TorrentFreak revealed: 74 domains are subject to the advertiser blocking programme, of which of October 2014 only 2 domains 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'. If the PIPCU do not receive a response from the website operators, the host or registrar 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 the PIPCU.
A freedom of information request requesting the contents of the list and whether it contains technology from the controversial advertising company Phorm was refused under section 30:
This is an ongoing investigation and disclosure to the public domain would raise the profile of those sites unlawfully providing copyright material. This would enable individuals to visit the sites highlighted and unlawfully download copyright material and increase the scale of the loss. In the case of advertisers, public identification would increase the risk of harm to them by way of cyber attack or other means.
In 2014 the PIPCU removed payment provisions from 4,650 offending sites with a .co.uk address from sites on the infringing websites list.