It is about to "become much harder to find streams of football matches and downloads of music, under new rules," according to Andrew Griffin of the London INDEPENDENT. Search engines Google and Bing "will hide illegally pirated content and instead show them links to places to get that same video or music legally, by paying." That is after the two companies "launched a crackdown on piracy websites and signed up to a new code" that is intended to protect users' safety by "stopping them from visiting disreputable sites." Alliance for Intellectual Property Dir General Eddy Leviten said, "Sometimes people will search for something and they will end up unwittingly being taken to a pirated piece of content. What we want to ensure is that the results at the top of the search engines are the genuine ones" (INDEPENDENT, 2/20). In London, James Titcomb reported the agreement "follows years of campaigning by record labels and film studios, which have accused Google and Microsoft of turning a blind eye to piracy and dragging their feet" over measures to protect copyright online. U.K. Minister for Universities, Science, Research & Innovation Jo Johnson said that the search engines' "relationships with our world leading creative industries needs to be collaborative." Under a new voluntary code, "the tech giants have committed to demote websites that have repeatedly been served with copyright infringement notices," so that they do not appear on the first page for common searches. Compliance with the code will be monitored by the Intellectual Property Office over the next few months (TELEGRAPH, 2/20). The PA reported media regulator Ofcom has "supported the discussions by examining in detail the way that search results are presented to internet users," and the group has explored possible techniques and metrics that can help drive U.K. consumers "away from illegitimate content." Motion Picture Association in Europe President Stan McCoy said, "Pirate websites are currently much too easy to find via search, so we appreciate the parties’ willingness to try to improve that situation" (PA, 2/20).