Slashdot Mirror
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."
Where are all the anti-anti-pirates?
Rather than exploit the free publicity and growth of revenue, they fight against the rising tides with their swords. If the movie and music industries collapse, it will not be due to piracy, but anti-piracy.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I just got a notice from NBC/Universal saying that I infringed their copyright by downloading and sharing a TV show. This means there will be even more people working against me?! Damn...
... on the swashbuckling seas of downloads.
I'd say "let the best pirate win", but I'm afraid it's going to be anti-climactic. The real pirates will swab the decks with these amateur wanna-be's.
I want some serious action to encourage the development of the completely anonymous protocols.
Keep pushing, studios.
Sounds like a sweet deal! I'll just copy that to my USB hard drive...
What would Brian Boitano do?
I think I prefer this sort of activity rather than forcing ISPs to do their bidding for no cost to the copyright holder. Or intensive lobbying that hurts everyone. Yeah, it may be a foolish quest to combat copyright infringement, but at least this way of going about it makes some modicum of sense.
Looks like these "anti-pirates" will only try to stop theft of treasure from Warner or NBC - everyone else is free game! Yar!
Regards, Steve
Have you ever used BitTorrent? [X] -- Congratulations you are hired!
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/02/20/
Emotions! In your brain!
I guess some people will do anything for money.
YARRR
WB UK doesn't want to get their hands soiled, so they get a bunch of job-hungry college kids to do their dirty work. I guess it wouldn't look seemly for a real -AA employee to "maintain accounts at private BitTorrent sites, develop link-scanning bots, [and] make trap purchases."
Better hope /b doesn't get a list of those interns. It would be really awful if someone were to leak a list of the chosen interns, post it to 4chan, and then have them torture and harass them until they curl up in the fetal position, crying.
Why is this an issue? Warner Brothers does have a legal right to enforce their copyrights. While I would prefer they focus on those that are profiting from unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, they also have a right to issue take-down notices. What would be unethical would be: uploading copyrighted material and then suing anybody who downloads it. Clearly, if WB themselves are freely distributing it, then they are implicitly granting permission for it to be distributed freely.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The entertainment industry keeps pouring money into anti-piracy and they keep getting further behind. The millions of dollars the industry spends on these campaigns bring in absolutely zero in increased revenue. If the industry took the position that file traders don't matter and that people who buy movies and music are the ones that do matter, they could then spend this money reaching out to people who will buy and bring in increased profits. Continuing to invest in the people who aren't interested in buying is only going to increase costs and drive paying customers away.
Well, it might work in the short term. All content protection, whether through DRM, laws, takedown notices, or any other mechanism is fundamentally founded on the principal that "we're smarter than you are", which in the long term is always an untenable position merely because of the scale involved. For every one person they employ to defend their copyright, there are a thousand people looking for ways to break whatever measures they put in place.
For example, it is possible to design a P2P system that does not rely on trackers (e.g. the DHT scheme that TPB uses). With such a system, content is not hosted anywhere that can get a takedown notice. Combined with onion routing (crypto), you can also make it highly infeasible to determine who is actually seeding the content, nearly guaranteeing that anyone you attack is an innocent victim, thus making the courts take progressively more negative attitudes towards your attacks. Put simply, the harder they try to clamp down on P2P, the greater the security measures that will be put in place to thwart it.
You cannot compete with P2P by attacking it. You can only compete with it by providing a better experience (or at least a comparable experience) through legal channels for a price that the market is willing to bear. Start by reducing the price of Blu-Ray movies to the same price as their DVD counterparts. That alone will take a huge chunk out of P2P.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This to me reads as "Warner Brothers is ripping off intelligent college students"
Keep your shitty check. If you want to pay people to do your dirty work, you better pay them a damn good wage.
I dont know of any US or UK mercenaries who work for minimum wage.
...their names will be posted to a public database, right?
So that all those nasty pirates sharing the college with them can have a friendly word with them to find out where they went off the beaten track, right?
Its all just a trap because by answering that question you also swear you have illegally downloaded content and are therefor a pirate and must be fined the maximum amount allowed by law times how old you are to give a rough estimate of the number of downloads!
The book industry has not collapsed since the e-books became common have they ? Or the music industry with the advent of i-tunes ?
Some one has to spend money to create movies like Titanic and Avatar - and then to market them. After spending so much money, it makes no sense to give it away for free - even to Slashdot readers.
Basically what you are asking is for McDonalds to give you a burger free cos you will then go and tell your friends to come and eat there. They probably will agree if they think you have the clout among your friends to influence their actions (such as popular bloggers). But if you are just some guy who basically wants stuff free.... no reason to give it away. The primary problem with giving it away is that human nature, by default, wants stuff free.
There is no reason to give away movies or music - if microsoft doesnt have to give away Office or windows!!
> causing general frustration amongst the file-sharing population on the
> Internet.
Make that unauthorized file-sharing. There are people who have no interest WB's crap: they are unaffected.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Thanks "anonymous reader" for making what might be the lamest, least effective job ever sound "awesome". But, you know if they're pirates... I don't really think The Pirate Bay nor it's users are going to give a damn about your "epic war", takedown requests or etc. What are these dumb college kids really supposed to do, go onto tpb.org and whine at the people there?
I'm not sure court cases can be described as epic...
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
When fighting nature, either nature always wins or everyone loses. In this case, they are fighting artistic and entertainment nature. Art and entertainment need to be free and need to be shared. It is an important part of what it means to be a human being. What big media is doing is wrong in the sense that they think they can control and limit and even "bottle up" art and entertainment to maximize their profits.
What people are doing with their collecting and sharing is natural human behavior. It doesn't feel like a "crime" to most people to share because it's quite natural and it's everywhere.
And please, I have heard the arguments before "but people wouldn't create if there were no money in it!" Pure nonsense. Fan films and other amateur work if littering the internet like never before. People love creating and building and showing off. They don't do it for money. They do it for attention or as an outlet or just to make people smile. Yes, there are many who are attracted to the media market because there is a lot of money to be made, but that's not why the TALENTED people do it... just the greedy ones.
:)
"They" will encrypt and anonymise everything and all you will do is anger your paying customers. Die by your own hand... foolish I say.
Charge less for your products, allow fair use of them, and provide them in open formats so that people can enjoy their lives rather than be enslaved to limitations.
Your call.
Think very hard about this. This is plenty of money to be made by treating your customers with dignity and respect.
When you pirate a movie, you don't have to contend with ads, previews or screens you can't force your way past. When you legitimately buy a movie, you are forced to watch previews, get stuck waiting for the FBI warning and often times contend with other annoyances.
Perhaps shafting your legitimate clients isn't the best way to do business?
http://www.allometry.com
This sounds a lot like "Come to the dark side, we have cookies"
Any poster who promotes DRM or blasts piracy, is going to be called a WB tool from now on.
anti-anti pirate-pirate-pirates?
(Look, Natasha! Is moose and squirrel!)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So now the slavemaster creates the house slave to pit against the field slave
Isn't that a pretty stupid use of the word "literally"?
P2P developers routinely receive offers to work for anti-p2p companies, developing against themselves. And not offers to help develop proper measures to control the copyright status of the shared files, but to create ways to disrupt their own networks, or other p2p networks, in clever ways. While I understand that contacting the more knowledgeable people in the field seems like the best move, this news item only proves that they can get the point after receiving a "Fuck you" answer over and over again...
If Warner Brothers is participating in a BitTorrent swarm, uploading files on which they own the copyright, does that imply that anyone is free to accept what they are offering?
Wow. I used to think being a dorm RA was the fast-lane to friendlessness, but clearly this is worse.
I predict a future news article:
"Anti Pirate found to Pirate that which they set out to Protect.
Meant in the metaphorical sense, get your mind out of the gutter!
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
My grandmother told me, that when the Nazis took over Luxemburg (our country), there were people who collaborated with the Nazis. They were called “Gielemännchen“ (yellow mankins), and often wore yellow rain coats. Everyone hated them.
Wanna know what happened to them when the Nazis were gone?
They were brutally killed by the villagers. Every single one of them. Often in cruel ways and with blunt objects.
So beware, if you dare to collaborate with the enemy. Cause they might not be there, when we come for you later.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
This makes me want to get involved in piracy again so that I can beat the living shit out of some of these sellouts.
Just post a few thousand Rick Roll clips the length of the movie only marked things like Avatar. When they find out 99% of the films posted are Rick Roll most will surrender or at least use up their bandwidth trying to download a film.
Who will the Ninjas side with ?
The student is not in authority to essentially sell the University's network access and network information to another business.
Create more demand for their service, with any luck converting it into a full-time position.
Why does this remind me a lot of "war on drugs" that USA is presently still losing (as it escalates to neighboring countries as well.)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Killing war criminals and traitors is far different from rounding up everyone you dont like and throwing them in ovens.
Nazis: round up jews, gays, 'undesirables', put them in camps, starve them, gas them, shoot them, hang them, throw them into ovens, make soap out of them. Villagers: watch friends family, thown into ovens, starved, gassed, shot, hung, after some prick down the road turned them into the nazis. Nazis leave, you kill guy that got half your village and friends tortured and murdered. BIG FUCKING DIFFERENCE!!!!
Maybe we should have a world media freedom day or something and have everyone refuse to go to the cinema, or purchase cds, in honor that behind the industry, there is the artist... or maybe we should just have a media tax and convert all media industries into public service.
The intern will literally be on the front-lines of the epic battle against pirated content
No, this would be "figuratively on the front-lines". Being "litterally on the front-lines" requires actual lines of battle on a phisical battlefield. Would it really kill the editors to do even some minor editing?
they would have to hire a lot of people and they would all have to be really good the throw a wrench in the system. Its like they dont seem to think that there are a lot of hacker and cracker pirates to fight off whatever they throw at us. And like stated above, any anti-pirates will be considered traitors, rules 3-7.
sounds like the plot to a boring hollywood movie
Isn't "Undercover Anti-Pirates" another way to say "Ninja"?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Two reasons:
1) I agree that the majority of file sharing is illegal.
2) I agree that the media companies are pretty evil. I should learn all I can about them and they should learn all they can about me. They need help figuring out the best ways to curb piracy, and make their own offerings more palatable to the general public. They should be allowed to make money for their work, but their should be harsher limits on their control of media. If they want me fighting for them, they'll need to agree to reform.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
In a free society it would be within the right of the content authors to try to use whatever "technological cleverness" they come up with to track at least some of the "pirates" who copy their works, for the purposes of identification for legitimate contract enforcement or ostracism. For example Microsoft might gain the identity of the individuals / businesses pirating their software (or at least the individuals / businesses like ISP's that refuse to cooperate in their investigation) and blacklist them with certain business groups where Microsoft may be influential. Vast business alliances can form naturally in the free market to protect common interests like anti-piracy, and a university may be contractually obligated to punish their students for "piracy" lest the university's garbage pickup company boycotts them - you get the idea. Market pressure can be a powerful force, but, unlike government force (i.e. copyright / patent laws), it is always based on legitimate individual rights and not mindless violence for the sake of the state!
UH, How much do they pay?
Are they going to upload fake torrents, because that already happens, and thanks to ratings, the fakes are found and banned.
Are they going to pack viruses in torrents? That already happens, maybe not by them, but see above.
Are they going to upload fake articles (because this is where the leechers [seeders] get their material).
Are they going to troll irc and try to trade with people....Does this seriously happen still? It's not 1995.
I thought we'd already cleared up that the legal avenues that the **AAs pursue are scurrilous already, and anything of this nature would start to be illegal.
The intern could also learn a very valuable lesson that the studios would have no interest in hearing. The underground exists because you aren't doing anything to monetize on it. You put out an inferior product that is crippled, and what these people offer is what everyone wants. An easy to obtain, high quality media product, without all the garbage that you force people to accept (unskippable menus, DRM, non-digital stores). You'd still see people not willing to pay, but you'd see profits skyrocket if you'd just accept that this is what people want instead of fighting it, and pretending it's still 1991.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
This issue is complex because the students who are being hired have no legal rights as any type of law enforcement. Therefore as shown in prior cases where private investigators gather information illegally (wiretap laws etc) from the inside of a persons computer the evidence is useful in a case by case basis, depending on the state, province or country's laws. Computer evidence is like the old time date stamp on a video tape; you can forge the whole thing (See Strange Brew :P). Prosecution cannot bring in evidence created in a vacuum, the state has to gather it. That's why lawyers supina records from ISP's through the court, otherwise evidence would just "pop up" as needed, if you get my drift. So really who cares about this weak lame attempt at coercive entrapment. All they are trying to do is get some dirty goods on you so they can convince you to settle for big bucks. Anyone who can should rotate MAC addresses and not use P2P, grow up and use encrypted torrents. Maybe a P2P or Torrent client should rotate your MAC address every 1-4 days so the end user cannot be railed in the ass.
"I was young, and I needed the money!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company
The MPPC was preceded by the Edison licensing system, in effect in 1907–1908, on which the MPPC was modeled. Since the 1890s, Thomas Edison owned most of the major American patents relating to motion picture cameras. The Edison Manufacturing Company's patent lawsuits against each of its domestic competitors crippled the American film industry, reducing American production mainly to two companies: Edison and Biograph, which used a different camera design. This left Edison's other rivals with little recourse but to import foreign-made films, mainly French and British.
Since 1902, Edison had also been notifying distributors and exhibitors that if they did not use Edison machines and films exclusively, they would be subject to litigation for supporting filmmaking that infringed Edison's patents. Exhausted by the lawsuits, Edison's competitors — Essanay, Kalem, Pathé Frères, Selig, and Vitagraph — approached him in 1907 to negotiate a licensing agreement, which Lubin was also invited to join. The one notable filmmaker excluded from the licensing agreement was Biograph, which Edison hoped to squeeze out of the market. No further applicants could become licensees. The purpose of the licensing agreement, according to an Edison lawyer, was to "preserve the business of present manufacturers and not to throw the field open to all competitors."
Many independent filmmakers, who controlled from one-quarter to one-third of the domestic marketplace, responded to the creation of the MPPC by moving their operations to Hollywood, whose distance from Edison's home base of New Jersey made it more difficult for the MPPC to enforce its patents. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and covers the area, was averse to enforcing patent claims.[citation needed] Southern California was also chosen because of its beautiful year-round weather and varied countryside, which could stand in for deserts, jungles and great mountains.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
No, knowing Visual Basic is what qualifies as an IT background to them.
If you admit to using BitTorrent on your application, they turn you over to the cops as a pirate infiltrator, even if you only downloaded Linux ISOs.
... they're all over Slashdot and don't sound nearly nerdy enough! So much for your cover, sucker!
Mind the frickin' laser...
If you want 2012 or the latest Transforming robots movie just effing go Wal-Mart or hit Amazon and buy the effing thing!
The media companies bad business model is not everyone's problem. The media companies treating their Customers like Criminals is bad business and they should pay the consequences. I am surprised their is not more pressure by their stockholders to end this kind of bad business.
If a pirate and an anti-pirate collide, do we get a large release of energy, and could this be a way of powering the planet. No more need for fossil fuels...
That's what we called 'em when I was in college - exact same principles - exact same ensnarements.
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.
Exact same cluelessness, all the way around.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Nowhere does it say anything about verifying that the employer has any legal rights to the alleged "pirate" material.
Look, if you want to hire me to be anti-anything, and want to write a big enough check, I'll sell out.
This is my sig.
"I was young and I needed the money" isn't what it used to be...
That, there's a ton of families out there ruined by abusive jerks with drug problems that probably should be behind bars for life or at least taken out of society. On the other hand, copying movies is entirely without physical consequence, doesn't disrupt job performance, and carries with it no social safety problems or cost.
Now sure, if you want to compare efficacy, yeah, you would be right. It's awfully hard to ban drugs when people want them. In that case, then, the argument would be that if we legalized drugs, it would do nothing to actually lower the use any more than making free material out there has lowered the volume of available songs. If anything, despite there being a legal market for music, there's more illegal music out there today than there ever was, and the legal channel just bleeds into the illegal one. Same argument goes, incidentally, for guns... if you can't ban something that is consumed once, like drugs, how will you actually ban a re-usable item like a gun?
This is my sig.
This might be their best idea yet. At least they know they don't have a clue, and are trying to hire people who do.
But with BT, who exactly would get the takedown notices?
Some days the irony fairy just gets carried away...
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
It will be interesting to see what happens when they get exposed to their fellow students. Somehow I think that the effect will be a little worse than your average online-bullying.
The best part of all this will come when the guys who decide to do this work for WB have charges pressed against themselves for p2p. I mean, really, what self-respecting IT grad would do this kind of shady work?
Given the culture of some residential colleges, I'd suggest the recruited anti pirate move off campus. If you thought hazing at some colleges was bad, imagine the consequences of busting your professor for pirating on your assignment and exam grades. Not all college professors follow official university ethics standards, hence the official ethics standards existence.
Entrapment.
ensnaring users in incriminating transactions
The police aren't allowed to do this, why are movie studios ?
Maybe the authors of torrent clients should implement an IP checklist, so that any known movie studio IPs that are found to be seeding get snapshotted and can be included in court submissions as illegal entrapment tactics.
the only work the people who give a shit about piracy do is fuck the artists out of money. There arent too many artists that care, and really those that do, Metallica, should be thankful anyone is even willing to listen to St Anger, its like a homeless guy getting pissed you dropped a dollar in his cup and starts demanding a $10.
What? No, i'm serious. sign me up for this job. this is fucking awesome.
Get PAID to do what i do now for free. Pirate movies or whatever i want. Free reign to do just about anything i like. And if anyone gets in my way?
Turn their ass in!
Sure i'm a prick. But i get to do what i want. get paid for it. and i know i'm on the wrong side of an unwinnable war! I can get paid forever! DO almost nothing, FOREVER!
I like free checks in the mail. Greed is good. Greed works.
Im a syndicalist, sabotage is in my heritage. Plus it could be a self-sustaining pot income, smoke while working with the money i make from work, even if i smoked a lot id break even, which is still ahead since its being stoned all day.
Mutiny!
If you're not going to buy, the MPAA wants you to pirate. It's the next best thing for them. Every download brings them closer with the courts. Every download increases the chance of a more restrictive copyright law being passed, or another media tax straight into their pocket. Every download increases their selection of potential easy lawsuits. They will milk their victimhood for as much money as they can.
The worst thing you can do to them is refuse both to buy and to download their wares. If both sales and downloads were to dry up simultaneously, the conclusion would become inescapable: they are finished. They are no longer wanted or needed. Their laws and secret treaties are neither wanted nor, from any perspective, at all necessary. They are the victim not of piracy, but of fickle demand and their own obsolescence.
They don't want to face this. They would rather an easy ride on your tax dollars.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Taking a pirate and turning them into corporate drones where they have ready availability to free media (I used to get a box of 100 DVDs at a time for free from Warner) makes it so that their pirate instincts turn dull quickly. Fact is, while these guys would be resourceful in the beginning, they would quickly become dead weight since they'd stop thinking like pirates.
It would make more sense to hire computer science graduates and have the work on the problem from a technical aspect as opposed to the social aspect.
Or they could just shut down Astraweb and Giganews and get rid of the SOURCE for most of the pirated content on the web...
the students are supposed to develop link-scanning bots!? These would be worth billions and the students are supposed to develop them for minimum wage?
God, is there anyone, that these fuckheads are not trying to rip off?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Im very proud of Warner Brothersdecision to finally take action and sending somebody to Somalia to fight the pirates!!! Kudos WB, we all support you! Give them hell!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
"Duke of Cornwall hires Swiss mercenaries to crack down on illegal trading of grain to protect his hereditary rights"
history repeats itself. if you let groups and people become feudal lords, they crack down on the people,f or their 'rights'. whats absurd that, after a point, they start to define what is a 'right' themselves, totally free of the people's will.
see, copyright was intended for 20 or so years at the start. now its 90 years. trademark was invented to protect well known brand names, now it has become something that you can lay claim to words, anywhere, any use. patents were supposedly to spur innovation, now they are tools with which you can lay claim to genes, and soon laws of nature. (well because you found them first, right ).
its stupid. we need to abolish these before we end up with a new, this time intellectual feudal aristocracy.
Read radical news here
a> this could be classed as entrapment & b> why would WB want to stop piracy of their movies. overall box office sales broke all records last year. more ppl go to see them in cinemas because they've tested them out in cam form first and want to see it on a big screen or in 3D with their partner or family
~don't feel threatened by my pineal~
"Wanna know what happened to them when the Nazis were gone? They were brutally killed by the villagers."
In that case, the villagers were no better than the Nazis.
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.
You know, the more I read about Thomas Edison, the more I realize he was a giant flaming asshole. His positive contributions to society were quite nearly overshadowed by his negative ones IMO.
In 50-100 years people will probably look back at Bill Gates the same way - and it would be worse if not for his philanthropic pursuits.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yes because allowing interns access to your systems certainly won't increase piracy....
Show me the gold and pieces of 8 :P
All cows eat grass!
We pulled quite a few of the tried and true college pranks back in the day...PB-smeared doorknobs, leaning a garbage can of water against an inward-swinging door, replace half of his shampoo bottle with Nair, etc...
"causing general frustration amongst the file-sharing population on the Internet." anyone else getting the feeling that all this means is that they are going to be writing viruses and attempting to distribute them to anyone found pirating the films? after all its not like any law enforcement agency is going to take them seriously
I think Bill Gates will get off the hook precisely because of his efforts to promote his image. Look at Carnegie and Rockefeller, those guys were devils and thanks to their libraries and a few donations they are considered heroes. Like Gates they took a ton from the public good, put a little back in, and in the end got preferential treatment in the public eye. Nothing much has changed since then.
with free movies and music.