The City of London police, a.k.a. the copyright police. NOT the Metropolitan police who are the actual police for London. Someone correct me---aren't CoL in the same group of "historic rights and privileges of the city of london" along with craft guilds and the lord mayor? They're basically business police.

Either way, CoL were pretty much the only group attempting to pursue UK filesharers back in the RIAA and MPAA lawsuit days. The rest of the police in the UK seemed to consider the latter a waste of time and resources.

So what we have here is a group possibly backed by those with vested interests (journal publishers, the big six who monopolise most of the market) seeming to dissuade already financially-encumbered students from using a free resource rather than paying the monopolisers more money, with vague warnings of "dire and perilous" risks. Sound familiar ?

I suspect the actual problem is more likely that some people have given SciHub login details issued to a university for subscription-access to electronic journal archives, and SciHub have probably raided one of the publishers' online sites. Universities tend to have full-access subscriptions to journals relevant to their reseach and teaching fields, as evidenced by the endless stacks of paper journals in most university libraries, and I suspect electronic access either has or will largely replaced that.

Century City was a lawyer drama set in the future which tried to look at future legal situations (think cloning, meddling with embryos to produce the "perfect" child, etc). Only eight episodes were produced in 2004 and four were never aired (including the one I'm thinking of; though they are (were) obtainable via p2p). One episode (Without a Tracer dealt with a possible result of this sort of device.

Basically, every child has a tracer (linked to video/audio surveillance no less). The episode revolves around a teenage girl who was fed up with being watched by her parents and removed her tracer, at which point the parents panicked because she'd apparently vanished. IIRC she hired a lawyer to get a ruling to "allow" her NOT to wear the tracer.

Their point was that this sort of device, whilst well-meaning, can become intrusive. I think (and the drama hints) that the tendency will be to rely on devices, further abdicating parental responsibility. Furthermore, I wonder if anyone's considered whether this would make the wearer EASIER to target, should the ID for their device become available, e.g. to someone wishing to kidnap a child for extortion.