Telangana launches special cell to combat film piracy

The Telangana government has launched a first-of-its-kind Intellectual Property Crime Unit (TIPCU), a special force to check film piracy.

The unit will go after websites that host pirated content.

TIPCU, launched here in the presence of US Ambassador Richard Varma, comprises representatives from the police cybercrime division, the state Information Technology Ministry, Internet Service Providers, the Telugu film industry, legal experts and financial experts.

“Telangana has become the first state to have put in place such a mechanism to crackdown on the video piracy market. This has been a long-pending demand from the movie industry,” the state IT Minister K T Rama Rao said.

According to an estimate, the Telugu film industry alone lost over Rs 380 crore in 2015 due to piracy. “We want to go behind websites and camcording syndicates which are the biggest threats to producers and their content,” said Raj Kumar Akela, Chairman, Anti-video Piracy Cell, Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce.

Since the Department of Telecom alone has the right to block websites, there is a need to amend the IT Act to make the TIPCU more effective. “We are preparing a case to convince the Union government to decentralise the IT Act because we are agile with our software. We are able to identify the pirated websites within an hour,” state IT Secretary Jayesh Ranjan said.