Warner Bros Entertainment UK is recruiting tech-savvy students to help the company with their anti-piracy efforts TorrentFreak report. During the 12 month internship the students will have to maintain accounts at private BitTorrent sites, develop link-scanning bots, make trap purchases and perform various other anti-piracy tasks. The people who work at the anti-piracy divisions of Warner Bros. and other large media companies have to be experts in file-sharing technology. It is therefore no surprise that Warner Bros. is actively recruiting students for a job as Anti-Piracy Intern, as most students have grown up sharing files. Warner Bros Entertainment UK is currently offering an internship to “IT literate” students with knowledge of file-sharing networks to assist in the company’s ongoing anti-piracy efforts. The internship deals with both digital and physical piracy and among other things the applicant will have to make trap purchases and maintain accounts at private file-sharing sites. The intern will further have to scour the Internet for illegally posted Warner Bros. and NBC Universal content and gather intelligence on the sites that offer these pirated goods. One of the more boring tasks listed in the job description is the sending of takedown requests and infringement notices to sites and users. The full job description taken from the vacancy (pdf) at The University of Manchester reads as follows: The lucky student who gets the job will receive a £17,500 salary for the 12 month internship that starts July 2010. Applicants are required to study a degree in a computing related discipline and programming experience with Java or JSP and PHP, Perl or Python is seen as a bonus. TorrentFreak are encouraging all eligible readers to apply for this exciting internship and provide them with regular updates on Warner Bros’ anti-piracy efforts. You have to be quick though, the vacancy closes on March 31.
Nah i didn't apply, i would be lying if I didn't say it sounded like an interesting job to me though. I'm not exactly against piracy, or totally for it either... I would feel a bit dirty gathering information and such on people.
I'm also on the neutral side if it comes to piracy. Using pirated materials is alright with me as long as you don't blindly download any movie or game you otherwise would've paid for. Thus for example, I'm against using your hacked PSP to run pirated UMD backups, while the (legal) hacks are meant to enable cool homebrew. The same with Nintendo DS flashcards, they're great for homebrew but shouldn't be used to prevent payments of games you want to play. As for WB and movies. I'd say go get a fanbase, and all those fans will buy your movie. Take Avatar as an example, no money losses there haha. Just because a movie receives an above-average rating doesn't mean any viewer wants to actually buy the movie in order to watch it just one time. Streaming services are the answer to win more customers that would've pirated the movie instead.