Shea: Warner Bros. hires anti-piracy intern

I like to romanticize the ongoing battle between record labels and torrent sites. With the… I like to romanticize the ongoing battle between record labels and torrent sites. With the big players on the torrent side of things having names like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, it isn’t hard to imagine that the guys running the BitTorrent sites are young Robin Hoods or Luke Skywalkers with a noble mission to deliver music to the masses, battling through the Internet to spread their good will.

But in reality, it isn’t nearly that exciting. It’s completely free of light sabers, spies, cannon-equipped pirate ships and dashing archers dressed in green.

It’s paper pushing. It’s motherboards. It’s straight-up boring.

But now at least these torrenters’ opponent, the music industry, has developed a controversial weapon against piracy that’s slightly less dull — an anti-piracy intern.

Warner Bros. UK is recruiting a young, bright, up-and-coming member of our torrent-loving, free-music generation to help them put a stop to illegal downloading.

It’s an interesting move for the media giant. For a computer science major looking for employment, it’s an appealing offer. The year-long internship pays about $26,000 (17,500 pounds), and is a nice credential on any resumé.

But the downside is pretty obvious — in playground talk, the intern would be a total snitch.

The ad for the position stated that the job would entail “monitoring local Internet forums and IRC for pirated [Warner Bros. and NBC Universal] content in order to gather information on pirate sites, pirate groups and other pirate activities,” as well as various other anti-piracy duties.

An unidentified Warner Brother’s spokesman told PC World that hiring student spies is, “legal and it is a very common practice.”

Warner Bros. is recruiting from the University of Manchester for a computer savvy student to fill the position. The deadline was yesterday, so pretty soon some (debatably) lucky student will have secured the spot.

Torrent news site TorrentFreak welcomed any of its users to apply for the internship and feed them information about Warner Bros.’ anti-piracy efforts. It’s a bit far-fetched, but maybe there will be some double-agent spy business happening after all. One can only hope for that kind of plot twist.

Spy or not, I don’t envy whoever fills the position. Being a professional tattletale is a tough spot to put yourself in, and backlash from peers is a guarantee. One commenter calling himself “dude” on TorrentFreak posted, “Only a low-life would sell his/her soul to the MAAFIA & Co.”

But money talks, and when there’s $26,000 on the line, people are bound to start lining up.