Warner Bros. Looking to Hire Secret Pirate Spy
The only thing more bold than this is if they were looking for pirate spy ninjas.
Warner Bros. is looking for an intern in the UK who is "IT literate" and is willing to help the entertainment industry in its fight against piracy.
TorrentFreak found a job posting listed at the University of Manchester that 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 intern will be paid a salary of £17,500 (around US$26,000) for the year-long position that starts this July. If you think you've got what it takes, check out the listing here (PDF).

Hey Warner Bros. You've probably got a hundred senior graphic artists on staff that know more about computers than any 18 year old willing to take a £17,500 internship ever would.
Hey Warner Bros. You've probably got a hundred senior graphic artists on staff that know more about computers than any 18 year old willing to take a £17,500 internship ever would.
Also - it shouldn't be hard to find a traitor amongst the greedy opportunists...
Is WB that desperate?
No one wants to pay $49 for the DVD and be forced to watch the "upcoming events". The only thing WB has been successfully at, is forcing its patrons to pirate.
Stuff like pirate bay/demonoid/etc ARE the big fish, I'm sure much much more pirating of their content happens there. And this seems a bit silly, I'm sure they could just find people involved in these sites and pay them to rat it out. Everyone has a price.
Oh, wow... they really drove you to it. How about showing up to the theater 15 minutes later than everyone else? Do you have to see everything opening night? ... and where the hell do you live that DVDs cost $49?
My opinion is that you should stop making excuses for breaking the law. Nobody is forcing you to pirate... you're just forcing them to raise ticket prices. I can't stand the way major film studios handle piracy... but the only thing that bugs me more than them is the pirates who try to convince themselves that they aren't doing anything wrong. If you're going to steal... at least fess up to it.
He does fess up to it....
what you mean is coming up with a business model that works in a world where it is easy and acceptable to just not pay for stuff if you don't want to, and take it for free?
granted that is ONE solution (if it can be found) the other is to just stop piracy at its source. I was just saying the other day that this is exactly what they should be doing, rather than horrible DRM and other blanket solutions that hurt the innocent more than the guilty . keep in mind, they aren't even interested in the downloaders, but the supply chain. and sure, they will never get it all, but they will get most of it, which is all they need. this is the proper way to try and solve the problem, and you don't need someone who is 'qualified' all you need is someone with the knowledge of the mainstream pirate (which isn't much).
good on you WB, as far as I see it, this is the best way to combat it, short of not combating it at all. I mean sure there are tonnes of things they could do to discourage people from pirating, (not least of which is making your products GOOD), but when you see people like Ubisoft and EA destroying the PC gaming scene, you have to commend people who come up with better ways of dealing with piracy.
No punch line. Thems the facts.
Dare I say it?
"That's All Folks!!!"
They aren't asking you to hack into a database. They are asking you to infiltrate these private torrenting sites and relay information about them back to WB. This is no different than a police officer going undercover and it certainly isn't illegal.