Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit

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.

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.

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, 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?

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