14 DAY TRIAL // The fight against online piracy was taken up a notch by the famous City of London Police who started displaying warning adverts on pirate sites.
TorrentFreak reports that the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit with the City of London Police has taken yet another step to fight online piracy by informing potential visitors about the fact that the site they’re viewing has been reported to authorities.
“The new initiative is another step forward for the unit in tackling IP crime and disrupting criminal profits,” Andy Fyfe, chief of the PIPCU, says.
The unit has also been working to inform advertisers on how to keep their images away from torrent sites in an effort to deprive them of cash, especially since advertising revenues are the only thing supporting this type of sites.
“Copyright infringing websites are making huge sums of money through advert placement, therefore disrupting advertising on these sites is crucial and this is why it is an integral part of Operation Creative,’ Fyfe adds.
He is referring to the recently-launched program that seeks to educate people about copyright and the protection of the rights of the content creators in the online medium. Numerous movie and music studios have already joined the cause and the government has agreed to shell out some cash for the occasion.
The police has partnered with content verification company Project Sunblock, which maintains the list of infringing websites and makes sure that when clients’ ads are going to end up on one of these sites, the police banners are served as replacement. Clients are then informed about how many times their ads have been redirected. Some 60 marketing agencies are involved already, so the reports need to be pretty explicit, including the brands the ads belong to and the number of times they were replaced by the City of London Police banner.
“This website has been reported to the police. Please close the browser page containing this website,” reads the warning displayed by several websites, as illustrated in a screenshot supplied by PIPCU to the BBC.
Of course, if people run AdBlock Plus or another similar tool, they’re likely to never see this type of warning. Of course, the ads won’t load either, so that’s less revenue for the site anyway.
During a pilot that took place last year, the number of ads from well-known brands on these websites fell by 12 percent, so there’s hope that the effects will be considerably larger this time around.
