PIPCU Chief Believes State Interference Crucial To Stop Piracy And Internet Lawlessness
City of London Police has a special unit that deals with intellectual property crimes and it has been working with copyright holders to deal with online piracy. Now, City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit or PIPCU chief Andy Fyfe thinks state interference is important in order to curb internet chaos and piracy.
According to TorrentFreak, PIPCU uses different ways to tackle online crimes like instructing advertisers to stop revenues from copyright-infringing or pirate websites. The unit also writes to domain registrars to take appropriate action against the websites.
Fyfe talked to PC Pro and mentioned that apart from units like PIPCU, intervention from the government will help preventing the lawlessness to spread on the internet.
"In the end, that might mean that the Internet becomes completely ungovernable, and that no one can dare operate on it at all, no one can dare do their shopping or banking on it. So should there be a certain level of ... state inference in the interest of protecting consumers? I'm very keen to raise that as a debate," Fyfe said.
Fyfe thinks that stricter rules are the need of the hour so that people will not break the law. A code of conduct is needed about the way people may use the internet.
When asked if PIPCU maintains a balance between protecting copyright-holders and making sure that "it doesn't go too far with censorship."
"We think we do. We're always very interested to hear other people's comments on that, because it's an interesting debate to be had actually - how much regulation, how much law enforcement there should be on the internet. A very interesting debate indeed."
He stated they only deal with websites that are reported to them and are known infringers.
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