The City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has started placing banner advertisements on websites believed to be offering pirated content illegally.
The messages, which will appear instead of paid-for ads, will ask users to close their web browsers as part of a continuing effort by the unit to stop piracy sites from earning money through advertising.
As a spokesman for PIPCU pointed out, copyright infringing websites are making huge sums of money though advert placement, so disrupting advertising on these sites is crucial.
The initiative will make use of technology provided by Project Sunblock, which is a firm used by major brands to stop adverts appearing alongside questionable content, such as pirated material or pornography.
Start Quote
Many websites, including those offering pirated content, use syndication networks to place advertisements on their pages and, because brands use the syndication networks like a wholesaler, they may not be clear what sites their advert will eventually appear on.
However, Project Sunblock detects the content of websites to prevent brands’ adverts appearing where they do not want them, so if a website on the unit’s Infringing Websites List (IWL) tries to display an advert, Project Sunblock will instead serve the police warning.
Until now, PIPCU’s most effective tool has been to get court orders directing internet service providers to block websites offering pirated content, either by direct download or through peer-to-peer sharing, but although this is effective in lowering the traffic to these sites it can be circumvented by using different technologies to get around the court-imposed restrictions.
However, losing advertising revenue could be a very effective way of closing these sites down.