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The City of London Police have started putting banner ads over sites they believe are offering copyright infringing content.
The City of London police 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.
The move comes as part of a continuing effort to stop piracy sites from earning money through advertising.
Police said the ads would make it harder for piracy site owners to make their pages look authentic.
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City of London Police Placing Banner Adverts on Pirate Sites
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(Score: 2) by tomtomtom on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:50AM
Simply put, they are involved because we don't have a national police force (well Scotland now does but that's very recent; this is also ignoring other semi-police units like the National Crime Agency).
Over time, the local forces divided up "specialist" matters between them for one force or another to lead on because the expertise wasn't worth duplicating many times over. The City of London had the "best" history of investigating complex fraud as a result of being involved in a lot of financial crime investigations (legitimately within their geographic remit). This later expanded out into "economic crime" which is where this fits in. They were also e.g. the lead force investigating horse-race fixing allegations in the past despite no horse racing going on within the square mile.
This is not some nasty conspiracy by shadowy financial powers as you often see suggested - it's just an artefact of the history of policing in the UK. And I'd say it's very likely being done with the encouragement and probably outright funding of central government which is who should really be taking the blame here.