Advertisements for dozens of Britain's leading companies appear on pirate websites showing bootleg copies of movies and television shows, the London Times reported today. They include such "blue chip" companies as British Telecom, British Gas, the supermarket chain Tesco, and the airline EasyJet, the newspaper said. Those companies, it added, "are indirectly subsidizing the U.K.'s multimillion-pound network of websites which allow people to illegally download films and television programs." Meanwhile, in an informal agreement between copyright holders and Google, Yahoo! and Bing, the search engine companies have agreed to give pirate sites a lower ranking than legitimate ones when they display results for searches about movies, television shows, games and records. They would also refuse to accept advertising from the pirate sites.

20/12/2011