If It's Newsworthy, Should A Website Reveal A Previously Pseudononymous Poster?

If File Sharing Is Costing Hollywood So Much Money, Why Do They Want To Pay So Little To Stop It?

from the hell,-that's-the-penalty-on-a-single-movie dept

Mon, Mar 29th 2010 2:44pm — Mike Masnick

A bunch of folks have sent over the story that TorrentFreak posted about Warner Bros. UK looking to hire a technology-savvy student for a year to be on its "anti-piracy" team. The job involves finding file sharing sites, monitoring them, and sending takedown notices. Fun stuff. But what caught my eye is that the job pays £17,500 for 12 months (or about $26,000). Considering that the industry pushes to fine people more than that amount per file shared, it certainly seems to be cheaping out to offer so little to the knowledgeable student they're hiring. If file sharing is really "costing" the industry so much, wouldn't the industry actually pay well to stop it?

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Filed Under: anti-piracy, file sharing, jobs
Companies: warner bros.

38 Comments

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:Lobo Santo (profile), 29 Mar 2010 @ 2:50pm

Well...
Two word explanation: "Scape Goat" Er, no wait, I guess that's supposed to just be one word: "Scapegoat."

Good lord, if piracy mysteriously and completely disappeared one day, they'd have to blame something else! In fact, for other fun duplicates of the same situation see: Drugs vs CIA, drugs vs DEA, illegal immigrants vs INS, creative accounting vs IRS (etc, etc, ad nauseum). Odds are they want to go thru all the motions of "woe is us! Those pirates are stealing our internets!" when in reality pirates have saved them the trouble of manufacturing another excuse for pitiful their performance.
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crade (profile), 29 Mar 2010 @ 2:50pm

How much is it worth to spam people with takedown notices? Sure you need to be somewhat ethically challenged, but obviously they can find someone capable enough to do it for that amount. If they want to spend more, I would think they would hire more individuals, not pay that guy more.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 2:51pm

i want the million dollar a year job doing security for a bank. they have millions of dollars at stake i am sure they can pay more too!
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 2:56pm

How much did they pay for 3 strikes? How much for ACTA? How much did they spend suing lots and lots of people? Maybe the budget is just depleted.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 2:57pm

Filesharing isn't costing Hollywood any money. It's the public and their continued disinterest in shiny plastic discs.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 2:58pm

Re:
How many banks spend under $1 million a year on security?
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 3:01pm

Re:
That might explain why there are less comments advocating a pro-intellectual privilege stance, not only here but elsewhere.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 3:14pm

Re: Re:
point is that their security spending per employee is not in some mythical ratio to earnings or income.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 3:26pm

Re: Re: Re:
If I were a bank and I was losing billions a year to bank robbery, why wouldn't I want to spend millions on better security? Try to get the best?

If Hollywood is losing billions a year to copyright infringement, why wouldn't Hollywood want to . . . .

Because they're cheap! Or copyright infringement isn't that big a deal for Hollywood.
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Jamie Carl (profile), 29 Mar 2010 @ 3:30pm

I just figured it out! 'Hollywood' isn't actually making less money from piracy. They are probably making more. They are just making out that it's costing them money to insight controversy which leads to free press coverage. Good citizens then feel bad for the poor little Hollywood moguls and then pay to go see more movies to ease the guilt.

It's such a sinister plan it might actually be true!
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 3:38pm

Re:
That's just diabolical. I have a screenplay to write!
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 3:42pm

Bad logic. Take crime X (X can represent any number of crimes, from graffiti to rape). How much do you pay to stop it? No, show me the check. Oh, you don't have a check? I guess you don't care about it, then.

We call that check we write "taxes." A portion of it goes to law enforcement. People occasionally badger their local representatives to pay more attention to whatever issue it is they care about. Industries lobby Congresscritters.

C'mon. This was a cheap shot.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 4:02pm

Re: Re: Re: Re:
yes but they spend it maybe $26000 at a time on security guards. they dont pay security guards millions each to work.
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sswam (profile), 29 Mar 2010 @ 4:54pm

pirates are also customers
The world is not divided into black-hat pirates and white-hat consumers. Many pirates also buy CDs, DVDs and go to the cinema, and I think most customers copy music and videos. If the big media companies were to prosecute pirates en-masses, they would be killing their own business. Any broad prosecution of pirates or destruction of piracy infrastructure would (or should) massively backfire on the media companies.

If they want to keep people coming to the cinema, they need to improve the cinema experience beyond what can be achieved at home, as with the recent 3d movies Avatar, etc.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 4:54pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Who said that? Oh, right, you did. Way to knock down that argument that you, yourself, set up.
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Flakey, 29 Mar 2010 @ 4:59pm

On the cheap
Hollydud has always been cheap when it comes to something like this. I shouldn't just say Hollydud but the majority of the entertainment field.

They want profits and profits aren't profits if they are spent. When you look at the long term actions it's always been about how do we get someone else to do it for us, rather than we do it ourselves. Maybe the sole failed exception to this has been sue'em all and we know how that turned out.

Why do you think they are wanting ISPs to do the policing of the net for their precious IP? Then the ISP gets both the black eye PR and it doesn't cost the copyright holders much as they aren't using human eye balls to fire off take down notices, it's automated. The automation results in all sorts of misidentified items as computers and programs can not distinguish what is fair use and what is the real article opposed to something named the same but not.

If you think the first sound of this is cheap, think about it for a moment and a new level of cheapness may creep into the discussion. It is a normal practice of all industries and businesses to provide summer work for college students to both assist them in financial aid, working for the summer and to find out if maybe that student might be interested in working for a corporation when they get out of school. They were called summer hires and were seen every year while school was out. This really sounds like a "we got a year's employment for a student that needs money to finish school".

When you look at it like that, it really shows how low pay this job may be.

I suspect this isn't really about what the student will do as much as what the student will turn up that could be of use in the future and at the same time to provide more fodder for the puff pieces that dot the news continually.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 5:42pm

Re:
also assumes that there is only one person in the whole world going after pirates. double cheap shot.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 5:51pm

$26K sounds like a pretty good stipend for a student internship.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 5:56pm

Whoever takes the job should have a camera crew following him/her 24/7 so they can make a reality TV show.

"I fvck people over because I'm cheap"
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 6:08pm

If piracy is costing Hollywood so much money why don't they put a list of what works they have copyright on so that people can avoid copying those works instead of expecting the public to be psychic.
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Atkray (profile), 29 Mar 2010 @ 6:52pm

Re: 26K
That was what I was thinking, probably 2-4 hours additional time to what you are already doing each week. I make that to be $125-$250 an hour.

That would almost cover the amount of alcohol I would need to drink each night so I could sleep.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 7:27pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
the suggesting by masnick is that the content people have only one single person working for 26k a year doing all of their anti-piracy work. it would be like a worldwide bank having only a single security guard. it is a stupid assumption intended as a mean spirited poke at the content producers. even masnick is smarter than that.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 7:32pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
A bunch of folks have sent over the story that TorrentFreak posted about Warner Bros. UK looking to hire a technology-savvy student for a year to be on its "anti-piracy" team.

THERE IS NO I IN TEAMWORK!!!
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Mar 2010 @ 7:33pm

Re: Re:
You know what they say about assumptions . . . .
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NAMELESS.ONE, 29 Mar 2010 @ 8:40pm

funny
and who watches the watchers and the abuse and the wrongful .....
YUP this is gonna bite them back later on large when people who did nothing wrong get trouble and sue NOT the person doing it but hollywood for instigating it.

In Canada if you got bad milk form a store and its found to not have been the store owner but the person that shipped it. IN past you had to sue the store owner who would sue the person that shipped him the milk. NOW YOU can go right to the source of the problem and sue in this case hollywood for SLANDER. DEFAMATION, and go for some pain and suffering.

THINK ITS A JOKE. i had a staff member accuse me of illegal piracy back in college , she was later FIRED

WHY? cause while the software was registered to another person all Microsoft requires in sale of software is that the cdrs and all packaging be given to you. INSTEAD of finding out that he had sold it to me they left that notice with my name in the computer lab for a week.

I and another had for a day or two prior to that had been experimenting with the communicator source code that Netscape was giving out and i was also helping get out as a mirror site....

YEA this is gonna go badly eventually. THIS was a school that had prior to this been interested in my computer skills to possibly end up teaching there. I said no. I pushed the issue by contacting Microsoft and in short order the school let here go.

LET THAT be a warning to punk kids that you better be 100% SURE. I could have sued and didn't.....

HOW Would you feel?
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Mike Masnick (profile), 29 Mar 2010 @ 11:55pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
the suggesting by masnick is that the content people have only one single person working for 26k a year doing all of their anti-piracy work.

I said no such thing. In fact I said: "Warner Bros. UK looking to hire a technology-savvy student for a year to be on its "anti-piracy" team."

Reading comprehension is a terrible thing to waste.
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DH's love child, 30 Mar 2010 @ 5:04am

Re:
Um.. last time I checked, copyright infringement was NOT a crime, but a CIVIL matter, so this whole argument is a total nonsequitur. We know, as a public, how much of our tax dollars are going toward preventing and solving crimes (at least in general terms), but in the absence of more revealing evidence, we are guessing, based on this job posting, that the good folks at WBUK aren't REALLY that concerned on piracy, or they would pay for either more technically savvy experts or at least more than one intern.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Mar 2010 @ 7:07am

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
last i looked that is a good rate of pay for a student job. the assumption made from your post by many people here is that they only hired one person to cover all piracy. that isnt right you left that impression but it isnt true. waffles for breakfast???
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JerryAtrick (profile), 30 Mar 2010 @ 7:41am

the real issue
Masnick is correct in his statement that Hollywood doesn't care about the piracy issue. In fact, they use it as a crutch more often than not to get what they want. If the industry was truly out to stop piracy, they wouldn't be doling out 26K to some piddly schlub to surf the net and catch rule breakers... They would invest millions of dollars with technology companies in order to make the obstacles for a pirate even harder.
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Joel (profile), 30 Mar 2010 @ 9:49am

Stop...
The industries have an easier of way to stop people from "sharing files" and it won't cost them anything... They just need to stop working and have the artist stop creating their works of art; and then after a year or two they can comeback and the people would be happy to oblige their wishes.
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NUKE intellectual property, 30 Mar 2010 @ 12:37pm

GOOD stop
OMG we want you too, why?
CAUSE ITS ALL CRAP
example lets say im a pirate
am i pirating stuff form 2000 on OR
am i pirating pre lawsuit age stuff more?

GO find out the results will startle the best of you.
THE best 'stuff' comes from before all the stupidity began and now tha all they have are lawyers runnign things the creativity is dying, the writers are shit for brains and nohting original comes.
LOOK at all the remakes they do:
plant of the apes
clash of the titans
Holloween
and so on
and every remake actually isnt that good , if it weren't for special affects....they'd flop.
and how many more batman movies do i have too endure?

id rather as an adult watch the justice league animated series form 2 decades ago....
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NUKE intellectual property, 30 Mar 2010 @ 12:42pm

pre 2000 correction
yea like all the best stuff comes pre 2000 very little with exception of stargate SG1 ( filmed 90% btw in canada )
heroes season 1 started great died when they start doing this massive interuption
ya i dont bother with new stuff cause its by and large just a way to prop htem all up i wont pirate it cause then they get no free advertising

FUCK THEM totally
and maybe the "scene" should give them a dose and stop doing it all for a year and see how quickly hollywood gets wanked for losses.

rumor has it a few so called private torrent sites are actually run by there people too.

they know they need the advertising
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anymouse (profile), 30 Mar 2010 @ 1:14pm

Re: So our taxes have been paying for Hollywood's fight against piracy, now I understand
Take a big problem XX (twice as bad as crime X, right?), how much would an industry pay to stop it? No, show me their check. Oh, they don't have a check? So there is no big problem then, right?

They call that check they write 'bribes' (or lobbying for the PC crowd), a portion goes to law enforcement, a portion to their local representatives, but most to the congresscritters, who then write them the laws that they paid for.

C'mon. This was a cheap shot....
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Mar 2010 @ 3:33pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
You're terrible at reading comprehension. Your posts remind me of someone, but I cannot put my finger on it . . . .
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Mike Masnick (profile), 30 Mar 2010 @ 4:24pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Your posts remind me of someone, but I cannot put my finger on it . . . .

Why yes, they do seem familiar, don't they? :)
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Anon, 31 Mar 2010 @ 6:37am

Fat-Cats
Well, "Hollywood" is full of Rich people, driving around in Lambo's and living in million-dollar pads, to be honest, they need their knees removing for the amount they get paid. If their whining about losses over a bunch of people stealing their 1's and 0's they should all be killed.
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James Legg, 31 Mar 2010 @ 1:45pm

internship wage
17.5K seems pretty good money for a placement year, I was paid about 14k 3 years ago as an intern working for a bluechip, a lot of my friends got paid a lot less. Of course I did get to keep my soul.
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