Government is to ask Google to help fight cyber crime

Hunt says search engines should be involved in the fight against cyber crime

The government is set to ask Google to play a greater role in the fight against online piracy.

Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, is expected to tell the Royal Television Society's Cambridge Convention tomorrow that search engines and other web businesses must "make it more difficult" for piracy sites.

"We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Neither should we tolerate it online," Hunt will say in his speech tomorrow, according to the Financial Times.

"We intend to take measures to make it increasingly difficult to access sites that deliberately facilitate infringement, misleading consumers and depriving creators of a fair reward for their creativity."

The government also wants search engines to use everything in their power to penalise web sites whose content is ruled unlawful.

The high court ruled in July, after a lengthy hearing and campaigns from internet freedom activists, that communications giant BT should block Newzbin 2, a web site that was held to have "flagrantly infringed" copyright.