MUMBAI: The Indian Music Industry’s (IMI) anti piracy wing organized a training programme for police officers of Maharashtra to raise awareness about Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and the importance of its protection. The programme was attended by over 100 Police officials, which included officers across all cadres such as inspectors and other ranked officials.

Raising concerns over the protection of India’s intellectual property, IMI discussed the importance of creating awareness about copyright laws amongst police officials and also shared the course material; this would be helpful in their day to day activities.

IMI has been regularly conducting training programmes on IP enforcement in India and had the distinction of conducting 150 training programmes in different parts of the country during last year with the twin purpose of training the ground level police officers and explaining to them importance of the enforcement of IPR laws in the country in the national and international context. Police has appreciated the initiative taken by IMI of training them on critical IP issues. Post training programmes anti-piracy operations across centers witnessed a major boom helping the industry to curb piracy.

Intellectual Property (IP) is defined "as any original creative work manifested in a tangible or intangible form that should be legally protected." The rights associated with intellectual property give legal protection to the work thereby being referred to as Intellectual Property Rights. PPL and IPRS, two bodies related to licensing were also part of the training programme.

IMI secretary general Savio D’Souza said, "This is a good start towards sensitizing the police officials and we are overwhelmed by the support of Maharashtra Police. Piracy today is robbing our nation of this cultural heritage by theft of the creative input. In the interest of the music industry’s survival, we are working closely with the Indian Government and are trying to relieve the country of this menace. Police plays a crucial role in our operations and hence they become a very important part of our functionality. We intend to spread more awareness on this critical issue through such forums and we will conduct more such training programmes across India with the support of the local state police forces."

Last year IMI with the assistance of the police conducted over 3000 raids, which were more than 50% of all intellectual property rights cases registered in India. IMI has also been in touch with the prosecution machinery and this has helped in ironing out deficiencies in investigation and prosecution of cases. It is because of the close coordination of the police and prosecution machinery that a Court in Delhi sealed the biggest CDR unit indulging into piracy. The plant was worth Rs 250 million (Rs 25 crores) when it was sealed