Warner Brothers Hiring Undercover Anti-Pirates 443
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."
My only question is... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
right ahead of the anti-anti-anti-pirates.
Shouldn't that be ... (Score:4, Funny)
anti-anti pirate-pirate-pirates?
(Look, Natasha! Is moose and squirrel!)
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It's been forty-five years. Now why do I remember that?
Some memories just never die
....they just wind up on hulu.com
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What is funny for me is that I have never ever seen anything from that show.
The only way I know that it is from some Rocky and Bullwinkle thing is because of all the references to that show from other american media over all the years.
Re:My only question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a competition. What they should do is offer Spotify [wikipedia.org] like service for movies all around the world, not just in US, and either ad-supported version or $10-$19 per month paid subscription with perks like PS3 and mobile streaming and so on. After Spotify came around 1.5 years ago people haven't had a need to pirate MP3's anymore. It's actually nicer to use than P2P - that's something that movie industry needs to have to combat piracy (hopefully Voddler [wikipedia.org] will get there). When the service works good and is reasonably priced, you win a lot of customers.
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Spotify is not available in most of the world. Only 6 countries and no linux client. I would rather just buy non-drmed music.
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It's a good example of a well done solution to combat piracy, and which is actually more convenient and better than P2P. I'm sure they will try to expand, they've had plans for US for a long time now. Also, their client works perfectly under Wine. With subscription you can also use Despotify [wikipedia.org] and other third party clients (theres some made for Windows Mobile at least)
Re:My only question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like all the disadvantages of pandora and none of the advantages.
A good example of combating piracy is cheap non-drmed MP3s.
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Pandora is an internet radio. Spotify is like your mp3 player, but instead of your local files you have access to their full huge library.
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Voddler also infringes on the copyrights of the XBMC developers, not a good sign for a company that wants to make money from copyrights.
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They were going to provide all the front-end source code, but it looks like they've moved Flash based streaming now. Which is a good thing, that older client was pain in the ass to use on any other kind of computer than a media center.
Re:My only question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
They were going too is no excuse, they still have not.
They still violated the copyrights of the XBMC developers and then expect to make money from copyrights. They are hypocrites who believe in copyright when it is good for them and not when it does not suit them. These are not the sort of folks people should give money to.
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They are hypocrites who believe in copyright when it is good for them and not when it does not suit them.
But are they much worse than the major motion picture studios, which moved to Hollywood just to be out of range of Thomas Edison's patent goons?
Re:My only question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope just the same. Mind you most folks don't know about that either, and the people who moved the studios are long dead.
Motion Picture Patents Company (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company [wikipedia.org]
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.
Edison = huge asshole (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Re:My only question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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yeah you pay their cheques... and yeah, we can get cheques elsewhere
tell me why your new employer should trust you after you betrayed your old employer.
tell me why he keeps you around after he's pumped you dry of anything useful you could tell him.
tell me how you stop the word spreading around that you are high maintaince, high risk.
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yeah you pay their cheques... and yeah, we can get cheques elsewhere
tell me why your new employer should trust you after you betrayed your old employer.
Because they have no idea. wikileaks and the like are anonymous, and if that's not enough protection for you, you won't post it there.
tell me why he keeps you around after he's pumped you dry of anything useful you could tell him.
If you got hired based on your insider knowledge of a few secrets, as opposed to insider knowledge of techniques and development practices, you're absolutely right.
tell me how you stop the word spreading around that you are high maintaince, high risk.
By never starting it, obviously.
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Employers, employees, nah, this is about uni students paid to dob in other uni students. Those naughty students who use the tech skills to minimise the content expired whilst racking up tens of thousands of dollars in long term eduction debt. So future fellow staff members, seriously, would anyone trust a part time pigopolist narc that ran around pretending to be other's students friend and entrap them into sharing content so they can pick up a prosecution commission.
This is not so much about peer to pee
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Where are all the anti-anti-pirates?
On 4chan. May as well give them something productive to do.
A fools errand (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:A fools errand (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's all stop for a moment to remember that we are talking about the entertainment industry. Let that sink in. Entertainment: something affording pleasure, diversion, or amusement, esp. a performance of some kind. (ref [reference.com])
All of these people--RIAA, MPAA, and their equivalents across the world--are fighting tooth and nail because some people do not consider entertainment to be worth the sometimes exorbitant fees required to access it, and because some people get their entertainment and chafe at being told they have to jump through hoops to enjoy it.
There are still people starving in this world. There are people fighting for their lives and their beliefs. There are human rights violations. And there is so much else.
And these people are fighting for the right to overcharge and micromanage your entertainment.
Re:They will not collapse! (Score:4, Insightful)
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You are reading too much into my comment. I was not proposing they give the movies away only invalidating the ACs comment.
Re:They will not collapse! (Score:4, Insightful)
No movie makes a profit in Hollywood. If you don't believe go look at the many, many, lawsuits. Titanic cleared over a billion and they STILL tried to claim it as a loss.
Re:They will not collapse! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:They will not collapse! (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't compete on price with P2P. How do you undercut "free"? But that doesn't mean you can't beat P2P. You only have to offer more, not (as it is now) less. And the first step towards that is to know your audience.
If the (quite successful) "metal box" releases should give a hint, it is that movie enthusiasts are willing to pay for their product if the product is to their liking. In other words, stop selling the movie. Sell the "experience". Sell the "exclusivity". Sell your customers the feeling that they got something great, something they wouldn't get if they just copied the movie.
The movie is not just a disc to insert into the player. The movie is also a box that will rest on the customer's shelf while he's not watching it. He will actually see that box a lot more than the movie, because it will always be there in his room, on his shelf, on display. Sure, they could make their own "presentable" cover. So you have to also instill the feeling that not having the "real" thing is phony, that they would sink in their friends' esteem if they did that. Teenagers are notoriously short on cash, yet they buy TCGs and Warhammer figurines, despite both being easily replaced by cut-out cardboard DIY cards and play tokens. Why don't they do it, why do they buy the overpriced cardboard and plastic? Because it would not be accepted by their peers if they did that. You have to do the same for movie enthusiasts! It just isn't cool to have a DIY cover on your DVD box!
To achive that, you have to make that cover something your customer will want to show off. That needn't be more expensive than the cheap looking nondescript plastic covers you use today. Get creative! You employ an army of PR goons, have them work for their money!
Re:They will not collapse! (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes hours for me to torrent a movie-sized file (i.e. a distro CD). I would rather pay a few dollars for a better download rate, better quality movie, etc.
But it's hard to justify $30 / movie for legal downloads, which is what the big distributors would like.
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Not if $x includes something else like say the shiny box to put on my shelf. I could see downloading a movie and paying $5 just for the shiny box.
Re:A fools errand (Score:4, Insightful)
Rewind even further. Books were copied by monks, taking much time and labour (if not money). Copying was extremely slow and extremely difficult. Copying was such a painful process, and distribution channels were so slow, that the idea of protecting a work against copying was laughably superfluous.
Copyright was introduced when copying became easier and distribution became cheaper, in the prediction that eventually it would become even more-so. The problem for artists wasn't that the technology was slow and expensive (compared to today), the problem was that it was quick and cheap compared to earlier times, and that technology was only making the process quicker and cheaper.
It is indeed the simplicity of the distribution system today which is the threat to artists. Anybody can create as many copies as they like. Now, it's not just a handful of printers eating into your royalties, it's any person who feels like it, with little investment of time or money. The natural protections of the inherent infeasibility of copying have been removed, and now the artist is completely at the mercy of the public and regardless of popularity guaranteed only a single sale (from which others may or may not copy).
Essentially, you have it backwards. It was the simplicity, not the complexity, of copying that caused the need for copyright. And today, we have it in spades.
Don't kid yourself. It's more than Big Media fighting for copyright. There are many indie artists similarly disposed towards piracy, as well as ordinary people.
It's A Fight To The Death ... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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It may be anti-climactic, but how about anti-climatic? Are anti-pirates good or bad for global warming?
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It may be anti-climactic, but how about anti-climatic? Are anti-pirates good or bad for global warming?
My Magic 8-Ball says "The Pirates Will Weather The Storm". D'oh!
Keep going (Score:3, Interesting)
I want some serious action to encourage the development of the completely anonymous protocols.
Keep pushing, studios.
Re:Keep going (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why I'm not worried about this.
The only people who are going to take a job like this are untalented drones of marginal technical ability who can't get a job elsewhere, especially at the . Furthermore, peer pressure is going to be enough to discourage most people (talented or not) from getting paid to turn narc / sell out to the man.
The smart, creative people are going to be on the other side of the fight.
Anyone with half a brain can tell that the copyright cartels are fighting a losing battle, desperately clinging to a business model that has been rendered obsolete by modern technology. P2P would largely disappear overnight if there was a legal alternative that offered a perceived benefit (guaranteed quality, good search, high speed download, brand loyalty, etc) over a pirate source. The studios are unwilling to do that because then they would have to charge prices that are dictated by the market, rather than by monopolistic fiat.
There will always be some people who will take free over speed or convenience, but there are plenty who won't -- just witness Starbuck's ability to sell a quarter's worth of coffee at a 1000+% markup.
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There are rather large darknets out there that are closed to new members. If you can get a private tracker (protocol doesn't really matter) community large enough and then close it off BEFORE you get infiltrated, you're good to go. Harder to do these days unfortunately.
Re:Keep going (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'm actually not that interested in availability of things online. It is ridiculous to claim that the entertainment industry doesn't lose anything due to P2P sharing. On the other hand, seeing the industry target people who have nothing to do with the original seeding of copyrighted material and sue them for everything they have and will have for several years makes me want to violate their copyright, just to piss them off. I've actually downloaded things just to seed them, and not actually to watch or play
Sweet deal (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like a sweet deal! I'll just copy that to my USB hard drive...
What qualifies as IT background? (Score:2, Funny)
What a bunch of pussies (Score:2)
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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."
It also depends on how they are hired. If the papers they sign state that they are responsible for their own actions, it would get WB out of any counter-lawsuits for thing done. Like if a incorrect takedown notice was issued or if they write a bot to scan and it either causes Internet shortages on a site or even worse, then WB just walks away showing those signed papers and the college kid is D.O.A. Not to mention with papers signed like that hiring people who might not know the legal issues of finding and
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> If the papers they sign state that they are responsible for their own
> actions, it would get WB out of any counter-lawsuits for thing done.
It isn't that easy. If WB directs their actions they are agents of WB and it might be held liable regardless of what papers were signed.
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Additionally they are essentially working as unlicensed private investigators. This is illegal in many jurisdictions and any evidence they may gather is likely to be inadmissible. The RIAA has already been sanctioned for exactly this.
Re:What a bunch of pussies (Score:4, Interesting)
If the papers they sign state that they are responsible for their own actions, it would get WB out of any counter-lawsuits for thing done.
Curiously, this would leave the WB "employee" liable for any sharing of WB material that they participate in while attempting to entrap others. Let me think, how could that be useful to WB... I see, wait six months after you hire your tranche of stooges, fire and then sue them using the evidence they supplied (thinking this was about others). Win the cases and then point to the stack of precedent you have amassed when you go after future cases. Sweet ;)
Better look out (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Nah they'l just get them banned from /s/
So? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
When we argue, we don't argue about what the law is. That's for the courts to decide. We argue about what the law should be. And, as the discussion here shows, it is not at all clear that Warner Bros is morally right in legally enforcing their copyrights against individual file sharers.
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Is that not what they are doing when they have their agents join a torrent swarm?
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Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to argue ethics, lets debate about movie producers and actors with net worths in the 100's of millions sueing single mothers and college kids for downloading a few movies they otherwise wouldn't pay to see anyway.
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They keep spending money on this (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this remind anybody of anything else...? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Interesting tactic, won't work. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Interesting tactic, won't work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Start by offering 700MB XVID downloads for about USD$5 from fast servers with fantastic bandwidth.
In the movie file, show one add for an upcoming movie, then show the credit card details and user account information for about 5 seconds. "this copy of $movie is licenced to $name $address $credit_card_number" . The customer will protect your movies with the same level of care as their card information, and will share it at their own risk or have to go to the hassle of editing the information out before putting it on p2p.
As parent said, only by competing with the product (p2p) will the movie companies win. And they have a chance to make some big money off that 'long tail'. Apply suitable methods to discourage sharing, and consumption will increase. Using this method, the movie industry would kill TV and make Billions.
Re:Interesting tactic, won't work. (Score:5, Insightful)
And why stop there? Here's a few other things that need to go:
Sigh. You're very bad people.
Shit job, Shit Pay. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Shit job, Shit Pay. (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If they were intelligent, they wouldn't be getting ripped off, now would they?
Make that unauthorized file-sharing (Score:3, Insightful)
> 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.
Epic? (Score:2, Funny)
I'm not sure court cases can be described as epic...
They are fighting nature (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Get a better DVD player. VLC is great at skipping that crap, dealing with scratched discs and upscaling.
Re:Won't work (Score:4, Insightful)
When you legitimately buy a movie
There is no such thing as buying a movie... unless maybe if you are the producer.
Since you only get a license for limited use.
But even if you could freely use it, there still is no such thing as ownership of information. Because ownership is defined as having certain abilities, like control over it. Which for information, is only possible, if it has never left your mind. But then you can also not prove its existence.
As soon as you let it out, you just split control with whoever received it.
Which means that it’s absurd to speak of “ownership”, when talking about information.
Information is free. Period. And just like with gravity, there is nothing, anyone can do about it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's funny, all the times I've bought a DVD I've never recieved such a license. Can you tell me what law necessitates that I have a licence to watch a DVD?
Re:Won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that these are people used to legislating their way to a business model. They have laws to create artifical scarcity, perpetual copyright, and once ACTA passes their own private police and lawyer force on tax dollars. If they viewed it as "competition" they might have a chance.
Instead, a whole generation of children are being raised with absolutely no respect for the copywrite bullshit. I don't think this is entirely due to the MAFIAA, but they are a contributing factor. Kids look at their BS ads about how "piracy is no different from stealing a tangible good" and realize the facts just don't add up...just like my generation looked at the "smoke marihuana once and become a crack whore" ads from DARE, GREAT, etc. All those lulzy comics about the kid who downloaded a song being dragged into criminal court (technically possible under DMCA but never happened yet -- good luck proving it beyond a reasonable doubt.), it just adds to the cynicism and disillusionment. The vast majority of people just don't give a fuck, and those who do don't tend to swallow this bs.
I'm not really sure precisely where this is going, but I do have to say that the fundamental disconnect in perception here is going to make for quite the firefight. After all, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Re:Won't work (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Bored of contacting the developers? (Score:2)
say goodbye to friendship (Score:3, Funny)
As useless as a finger in the dyke (Score:2)
Meant in the metaphorical sense, get your mind out of the gutter!
Traitors beware! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Remember me to never use a yellow raincoat in Luxemburg.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The moral of the story is... don't keep living in a town when you've spent the last three years helping kill their friends and family.
I really don't think there's much comparison between lynch mobs and the Third Reich.
Re:Traitors beware! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the moral is that the idea of an internship is to help you get hired for a job in the IT industry.
Making yourself IT-lynch-mob-fodder is not necessarily the best way of going about doing that.
Had I had such a background (and for the protocol, you'd need to point a loaded gun at me to get me to do this), I most certainly would not advertise this on my resume.
I'd do it. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'd do it. (Score:4, Insightful)
I appreciate your optimism, but I don't think the people being hired for this are really in any position to make demands about how the industry carries out their business. If you tried you'd probably be let go.
By what means (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I can already hear it, 10 years from now... (Score:5, Funny)
"I was young, and I needed the money!"
Narcs (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Hmmm... what's missing from the job description? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nowhere does it say anything about verifying that the employer has any legal rights to the alleged "pirate" material.
Slaves will do anything for a buck (Score:3, Funny)
One word ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Short lifed career (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Lets rephrase this and see how it looks : (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
UK rushing through law to disconnect filesharers (Score:4, Informative)
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 [openrightsgroup.org] 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Well obviously they're only going to send copyright infringement notices for Warner and NBC content because they work for them and are only authorized to send such notices for them. But what makes you think no one else has such departments? I'm quite sure they do, or have outsourced it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone is far less likely to sue a 'poor student' than a rich company for improper takedowns.
I've got two words for you: Vicarious Liability [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Two words: Agency Theory.
If you find out who sent that overzealous intern after you, good ole Respondeat Superior will take care of the big dog.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You could always watch it on hulu.
HAHAHAHA, ok sorry could not keep a straight face.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me guess, you're one of the people the article is talking about.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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...
Be aware that such annihilations usually produce large amounts of dangerous DRM radiation.