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Anti-Piracy is a big issue in Hollywood as the studios are potentially losing millions each year when users illegally download their movies online .  It’s hard to believe when we hear movies like Avatar are breaking financial milestones and Hollywood seems to be up despite terrible movies coming out.  But the truth is, technology is leading the way towards illegal downloads and it doesn’t look like it will be stopping soon.  And why not?  Spend an hour downloading a decent quality new released movie and watch it for free, or spend $10+ to take a chance on a possible mediocre movie.

Well Warner Bros UK is leading the way to take a stand against anti-piracy and is building a team of aces to crack down on it.  They are hiring interns for a 12 month position who are responsible for finding these bit torrent sites and learning the ins and outs so Warner Bros can take actions against these sites and to hopefully decrease the amount of online piracy that is going around.  The IT literate students needs to be experts in file sharing technology.  They will have additional responsibilities in researching these sites and developing technologies scouring the internet and finding sites and ways to crack down.  This is an extremely bold move by the studio and I am surprised that we are not seeing more of this from studios.

I mean the government looks to ace hackers when developing security programs for top secret government sites so I don’t see why studios have been taking so long.  Regardless of the efforts of the interns or full time employees who may be responsible in leading the charge, hackers and IT studs will always improve and alter the technology to be one step ahead.  It’s a cat and mouse battle between the two and the distance seems to be getting shorter although I always think that there will be ways to get movies illegally.

Here’s the job description for the internship:

“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.”