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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."
those would be the interns that end up posting information from these companies on wikileaks showing that they are doing illegal things... ah to the companies that think us geeks care about company loyalty... yeah you pay their cheques... and yeah, we can get cheques elsewhere
Oddly enough, the most exclusive of the darknets are considerably more dangerous to be members of than being part of a large and very public crowd. I personally know one person who went to a halfway house, two who went to jail, and one who plea-bargained out of cell time because they were running servers for an extremely small and exclusive group of copyright infringers. They got taken out so hard because the FBI took an interest based solely on their reputation, and not on any possible damage done to rights holders. It was very much a case of flies and sledgehammers.
Personally, I recommend avoiding invitation-only darknets. First, because they encourage law enforcement to see it as a challenge, and second because that's not how to win the dispute. The only way the assertion that copyright powers are wildly out of control and out of proportion will carry the day is if it's a cultural movement. The entire population has to be involved, and has to stick to it even when some of its members go down.
That's what's happening now. The current situation is basically civil disobedience on an epic scale, despite the resounding lack of large crowds and firehoses. If you retreat to hidden darknets, you're losing.
The rights holders still think they can preserve their rights, and even expand them, and with them their revenues. They're doomed. I've seen what the 11-17 year old crowd is doing, and I've heard how they think. They share. A lot. They're barely aware that the proverbial powers that be don't like it, and they get grumpy when their favorite Youtube video gets taken down because it used copyrighted background music, but they don't for a minute believe there was any justification in the takedown. They literally don't recognize the rights being claimed. I don't see that attitude going away because it's almost completely passive. They are not taking a principled stand. They're not aggressively standing up and demanding the distribution restrictions on Steamboat Willie be rescinded. The decision happens much more subtly than that. Each one of them is just a little snowflake in an avalanche: the avalanche is not their intention - it's their very nature.