Warner Bros to Recruit Students For Anti-Piracy Duties

Warner Bros. (WB) Entertainment, Inc. is offering British students the opportunity to spend a year helping with a new anti-piracy campaign. The job will involve finding pirated content online and even going undercover.

While the role is advertised as an "Anti-Piracy Internship", it actually pays an equivalent to $26,000 US dollars. It's only open to students on a computer-related course and is designed to be filled by somebody on a "sandwich" course, which involves a year-long industrial work placement. Given that the post is based in London, that's about the going rate for such a placement year.

Interns to Carry out 'Trap Purchases'

The job is quite comprehensive. As well as searching online for pirated material, the intern will also carry out "trap purchases of pirated product[s]".

The job description notes that programming skills in a range of computer languages is a significant advantage. That's because the successful candidate will be asked to produce automated systems for scanning links to detect illegal content.

There may be more to the recruitment than simply finding a relatively cheap way of cracking down on piracy. Chances are that a computer student in their early 20s is already familiar with various file sharing networks and more savvy than Warner's own staff when it comes to finding illegal content. (Source: torrentfreak.com)

Extensive Duties Involved

The full list of duties for the role includes:

• Monitoring local Internet forums and IRC for pirated WB and NBCU (National Broadcasting Company Universal) content.
   
• Gathering information on pirate sites.
   
• Scanning for links to hosted pirated WB and NBCU content and using tools to issue takedown requests.
   
• Electing local keywords and submitting local filenames for monitoring and countermeasure campaigns (Source: pcmag.com).

Several tech and file sharing websites have already commented that this would be a perfect opportunity for a student to act as a "double agent" and share details of Warner's anti-piracy tactics. But it seems unlikely Warner hasn't already thought of that and the firm will likely insist on a strict confidentiality agreement.