Two other high-profile organizations were caught downloading illegal content

Dec 19, 2011 08:09 GMT  ·  By

The now famous YouHaveDownloaded websites, which monitors 20% of the public BitTorrent downloads, helped identify two other organizations that normally shouldn’t be involved in such practices.

[ADMARk=1]The first copyright infringer is the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), one of the companies that’s known to fight long battles against those they consider pirates.

After obtaining their IP addresses, the guys at TorrentFreak decided to take a peek at what takes place within their offices and the results were surprising, at least. Kanye West and Jay-Z albums, five seasons of Dexter, an episode of Law and Order and a couple of audio applications were found to be downloaded from IPs belonging to RIAA.

If some of this content may have been downloaded with the purpose of identifying pirates, one would find it hard to believe that you need five seasons of a TV series to prove a point. Not to mention the audio software which has nothing to do with the copyright owned by artists.

The second organization, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was also recorded as downloading bootlegged materials.

More than 900 unique IP addresses were identified as being guilty of copyright infringement and even if the DHS employs 200,000 individuals, it’s still a lot for someone who condemns piracy.

Of course, these are not the first highly rated organizations that were caught by the monitoring website. Last week we learned about Sony, Universal and Fox employees who helped themselves to copyrighted files from torrent portals.

Even the residence of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was appointed as housing pirates. At the time we saw how a high definition Beach Boys music album and a few other files were downloaded.

While RIAA is one of the associations that requested for all copyright infringers to be monitored closely by their ISPs, it’s really hard to believe that someone will question them about the illegal operations that take place within their offices.