Warner Bros recruits students for piracy crackdown

Warner Bros is seeking an 'anti-piracy intern'

Film and music giant Warner Bros Entertainment UK is seeking to recruit a university student to monitor the trafficking of pirated content.

The Manchester University job posting (PDF), obtained by file-sharing news site Torrent Freak, offers a 12-month "anti-piracy intern" position to students studying a " computing related discipline".

The candidate will need to be familiar with file-sharing services, web forums and IRC systems.

The £17,500 salary will require students to go undercover on file sharing services, creating accounts and monitoring content to track the exchange of possibly pirated Warner Bros content.

Additional duties involve developing and maintaining 'bot' programs to automatically crawl the services and log traffic, as well as sending infringement notices.

Warner Bros will provide training on the development and use of the anti-piracy and monitoring applications.

The position could, however, put some students in the awkward position of having to turn in their peers. University campuses have long been targets for anti-piracy enforcement efforts.