The US will work closely with India to intensify its crackdown on the pirated Bollywood movies and counterfeit pharmaceuticals, a top official has said.

Observing that both the pirated Bollywood movies and the counterfeit pharmaceuticals have been causing huge financial losses, Matthew King, Deputy Director Homeland Security Investigations, and National Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Co-ordination Center, told foreign journalists that such a crackdown would intensify in 2011.

“We do a lot with counterfeit pharma and the active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) coming out of India. We have a very good relationship with Indian authorities, trying to work collaboratively on some of the issues, not only the Bollywood films and the content but also on API,” King said.

“Realise that if you’re talking about API, the pharmaceuticals, and you’re talking bulk, you’re not sending that through the mail facilities. You’re using containers.

“And that’s where our expertise with customs authorities, police authorities — if you move a container, there has to be paperwork. And it’s much easier to track than, say, a first-release Bollywood film that immediately is out on the Internet,” he noted.

“When you look at the level of sophistication of how people are grabbing these films, you no longer see a hand-held camera with people walking in front of the movie screen. I mean, these are really first-rate to include 3-D sound, every language, immediately, and it’s out there before the release in India or the release in the US of our films,” King said observing that this is a bit complicated.

In November, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had launched operation ‘In Our Sites’ to target pirated internet movies and grabbed as many as 82 domain names of commercial websites engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works.

“I think in 2011 going forward, one of the things we’d really like to explore with the Indian authorities and with all of our partners is if we’re doing an operation like ‘In Our Sites’, going after the Internet, would the Indian authorities like to work with us on an operation? Maybe they know a few sites and we could go after them collaboratively, obviously within the purview of our law and to the extent that we can,” King said.

On the movies, King said the US Government is also collaborating with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).

“They are very aggressive in looking for their clients on where these are being downloaded from — great in-house investigative departments, and they work with us collaboratively to help identify the sites. So we did that,” he said.