Warner UK Recruiting Students to Spy on File Sharers

In another effort to curb online piracy of copyrighted material, the UK branch of media giants Warner Bros. has begun to recruit student interns as moles to track and halt illegal file-sharing activity.

As TorrentFreak points out [via The Daily Swarm], the anti-piracy division at Warner has acknowledged the need for file-sharing experts to help track and defeat other file sharers, and has found a way to get them: students internships.

Warner is now offering paid internships with duties that include making trap purchases at illegal sites, maintaing accounts at file-sharing sites, scouring the net for illegally posted Warner Bros. and NBC content, gathering intelligence on sites that illegally post copyrighted content, and sending takedown requests and infringement notices to sites and users.

A PDF file of the job description being offered by the University of Manchester (viewable here) reads as follows:

During the 12 month internship, duties will include: monitoring local Internet forums and IRC for pirated WB and NBCU content and in order to gather information on pirate sites, pirate groups and other pirate activities; finding new and maintaining existing accounts on private sites; scanning for links to hosted pirated WB and NBCU content and using tools to issue takedown requests; maintaining and developing bots for Internet link scanning system (training provided); preparing sending of infringement notices and logging feedback; performing trap purchases of pirated product and logging results; inputting pirate hard goods data and other intelligence into the forensics database; selecting local keywords and submitting local filenames for monitoring and countermeasure campaigns and periodically producing research documents on piracy related technological developments. Various training will be provided.

The 12-month internship pays 17,500 pounds ($26,779 Canadian).

A clever move on the industry's part, but can it outsmart those Internet pirates? We're thinking no, but at least it's better than this: