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Warner Brothers Hiring Undercover Anti-Pirates
An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak reports that Warner Brothers UK is hiring college students with an IT background to participate in an internship that will pit them against pirates on the Web in an effort to crack down on illegal digital distribution. The intern will literally be on the front-lines of the epic battle against pirated content, ensnaring users in incriminating transactions, issuing takedown requests, and causing general frustration amongst the file-sharing population on the Internet."
Actually, I expect the pirates to be at the head of the line. At least, if I was in the business of stealing content, what better way to get to know the enemy?
And, for the icing on the cake, I get a paycheck for it! Yippee! Where do I sign up?
The Invention of Lying had *Literally* 20 minutes of previews.
You could not skip them.
You could not reach the title screen through top, or menu.
You could not scan through them (at the end of the first trailer, it would simply repeat.)
Ultimately had to use a title/chapter search feature of my dvd player to get to the title.
20 minutes of unskippable bullshit? seriously, it made me want to crack the disk before sending it back to netflix.
The UK government is rushing through a law on filesharing in the last week of parliamentary business before the general election. It's bypassing the normal line by line debate in committees etc.
The proposed law, which will become law shortly after April 6th on current plans, will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
See http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/why-care for more details and what to do about this.
The relevance to this story is that the UK students that Warner is recruiting might well uncover the "filesharing incidents" that would feed into this heavy handed enforcement mechanism.