Congress agreed to provide $30 million in new funding for the battle against piracy on Monday, according to the Hollywood Reporter [1], as authorities also reported success with a recent year-end federal piracy crackdown.
Dan Glickman, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, and Mitch Bainwol, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, announced the results from Operation Holiday Hoax on Monday, joined by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Assistant Secretary John Morton, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and other federal officials from the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center.
The new funds from Congress target personnel and programs authorized by last year's Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act.
The funds include $20 million for new state and local economic, high-tech and Internet crime prevention grants; $8 million for new FBI agents targeting intellectual property crimes; and $2 million for new Department of Justice IP prosecutions.
Operation Holiday Hoax, a nationwide federal crackdown on counterfeit products, focused on illegal vendors throughout several major U.S. cities and netted seven arrests and 79,796 counterfeit CDs and 79,610 DVDs.
According to a report by the Institute for Policy Innovation, counterfeiting and copyright theft cost the U.S. copyright industries – including the motion picture and sound recording industries – more than $25 billion a year. That translates into nearly 375,000 lost jobs and more than $16 billion in lost annual earnings for American workers.