What’s the news: Data protection laws outside India like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) hinder piracy investigations by Indian law enforcement agencies, said Brijesh Singh, Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra during a US Consulate seminar in Mumbai on the ‘Piracy-Cybercrime Nexus.’ During the event which was held on March 19, 2024, Singh talked about the creation of Maharashtra’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (IPCU) and how piracy now contributes to the spread of malware across devices in India. Singh said that the creation of IPCU was supported by the US Consulate, the government as well as various industry holders. “The then US Consulate General said he wanted us to take intellectual property rights seriously,” said Singh. However, the unit soon found two hurdles in terms of investigating piracy cases. The first issue was that only 14 percent of piracy cases in India originated from the country itself. Most piracy crimes originated from outside India. This meant that the local police had to coordinate with foreign law enforcement agencies to carry out investigations. The other issue was that laws like the GDPR in the EU made it difficult for Indian agencies to look into piracy issues because police information was redacted under such laws. This made it difficult for the police to obtain phone numbers of persons, etc. Singh bats for a universal protocol on cybercrime “I think the governance of intelligence is broken because we do not have a universal protocol yet… rather than looking…
