14 DAY TRIAL // What does Warner Bros. have in common with the Chinese communist party? Well, both 'organizations' are looking for volunteers to spy on their peers, though there are some slight differences when it comes to the reason behind this. Torrentfreak reports that the major Hollywood studio is looking for students from The University of Manchester in the UK for an internship that requires them to actively seek pirates on the open web, but also create more innovative means of catching these criminals.
The paid internship doesn't look too bad for students seeking to beef up their revenues. Warner will pay £17,500 for the 12 months of the internship program that starts in July.
"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)," the job listing read (PDF).
Warner is particularly interested in students specialized in a computing-related area and programming experience is a plus. The studio doesn't just want people who know how to use a BitTorrent site, it wants them building bots to scour the web for infringing material and also setting up traps for would-be pirates.
They would have to be up-to-date on any development in the world of online piracy and are required to provide reports on any information they gather. What's more, the students will also act as the company's legal foot soldiers, as they will have to issue takedown notices for content that they believe is infringing. Of course, since not even the big content companies themselves are having trouble determining which content is infringing and which isn't, this last part is just likely to create even more confusion and make content owners look worse than they've managed so far.