Warner Brothers recruiting for student spies

Students in the United Kingdom can apply for the 12-month internship as Anti-Piracy Intern at the media giant company, with the prime objective of fighting piracy. Primarily, students would research newsgroups and online forums for pirated content. According to the job description at the University of Manchester, potential interns would also write automated bots for link scanning and send infringement notices to alleged violators.

Warner Brothers lists the internship compensation as $26,000 for the year and is looking for students with computer-related disciplines and programming experience.

The recruitment for student spies sounds like it would raise legal red flags, but according to Pinsent Mason law firm spokesperson, this is legal and a very common practice for companies.

“There are a couple of potential legal issues but it looks like they’ve covered their bases,” the unnamed spokesman told PC Pro. “They (Warner Brothers) have to log the problems in case it comes up in court … (and) they can only monitor their own content.

“It’s very common across numerous sectors – music, film, visuals – they use it to monitor infringements.” TechRadar.com adds that TorrentFreak, a blog dedicated to peer-to-peer file sharing site BitTorrent, is also on the lookout – for the Warner Brothers “spies.”

PC Pro also said Warner Brothers wouldn’t elaborate on the opening, just confirming it. Prospective candidates have until March 31 to apply for the internship.