Warner Bros. UK Recruits Students to Spy on Pirates

Warner Bros Entertainment UK is recruiting tech-savvy students to help the company with their anti-piracy efforts. 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.

Do I smell a rat?

*shifts eyes about*

Sounds almost like an internship...

ManipUni said:

Sounds almost like an internship...

"One of the more boring tasks listed in the job description is the sending of takedown requests and infringement notices to sites and users."

Is this not the job of lawyers? I doubt a "friendly email will have any impact.

Harlequin said:

ManipUni said:

*snip*

"One of the more boring tasks listed in the job description is the sending of takedown requests and infringement notices to sites and users."

 

Is this not the job of lawyers? I doubt a "friendly email will have any impact.

Ideally, yes; but you don't need to a laywer to send one, or even write one. You'd be surprised how effective those emails are: lots of hosting companies willingly roll-over to avoid any costly lawsuit (the potential losses of being sued, far outweight the loss of a single customer).

I assume those takedown notices are just DMCA notices. Again, you'd be surprised at how non-US hosts comply with them even though they have no legal jurisdiction.

W3bbo said:

Harlequin said:

*snip*

Ideally, yes; but you don't need to a laywer to send one, or even write one. You'd be surprised how effective those emails are: lots of hosting companies willingly roll-over to avoid any costly lawsuit (the potential losses of being sued, far outweight the loss of a single customer).

 

I assume those takedown notices are just DMCA notices. Again, you'd be surprised at how non-US hosts comply with them even though they have no legal jurisdiction.

The US DMCA notices have power in more countries than you might think... The UK included.

I love the story of one company suing another because the latter one stole their takedown notice. Talk about irony...