{"id":496009,"date":"2010-03-31T14:22:37","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T18:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/business\/archive\/2010\/03\/how-do-you-catch-a-movie-pirate\/38264\/"},"modified":"2010-03-31T14:22:37","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T18:22:37","slug":"how-do-you-catch-a-movie-pirate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/496009","title":{"rendered":"How Do You Catch a Movie Pirate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Movie studios are looking for new tactics against illegal file-sharing and other copyright infringement, from hiring young, tech-savvy turncoats to taking legal action against digital pirates and the search engines they use. The increasingly aggressive moves reflect the growing severity of the industry’s global problem: Piracy is so commonplace in Spain that soon it may not make financial sense<\/a> to sell DVDs there at all.<\/p>\n

The latest move is all too familiar for the music industry’s own travails: sue the downloaders. Over 20,000 movie downloaders have been sued<\/a> over the past few weeks by US Copyright Group<\/a>, a DC legal firm that is actively seeking out companies that want to sue. The firm is drumming up business with an aggressive pitch to movie copyright holders, stating on its website: “We are here to recover losses for copyright holders and to stop film
\npiracy. We are here to SAVE CINEMA.”<\/p>\n

The Motion Picture Association of America has expressed interest in US Copyright Group’s approach, but hasn’t signed on yet. A recent history lesson suggests why: The Recording Industry Association of America sued thousands of people before abandoning the wave of lawsuits<\/a> in 2008. The campaign was an unambiguous public relations disaster, illicit music downloads continue apace, and the industry has continued to struggle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One alternative to suing individuals is taking action against the companies that facilitate downloading. The MPAA just landed another victory against Isohunt<\/a>, one of the world’s leading search engines for torrents, files that are used to share both legal and illegal content. A U.S. judge just ordered Isohunt to remove all infringing content<\/a> from its site; the site’s administrator said that would effectively force him to shut it down. <\/p>\n

The problem is that fighting filesharing sites is a massive game of Whack-a-Mole: Bash one and three more pop up. Again the history lesson is telling: After the music industry smashed Napster, dozens and then hundreds of smaller services took its place.<\/p>\n

The final recent tactic is to hire spies. On Monday, TorrentFreak, a Web site which covers torrents, reported on a a new job listing<\/a> from Warner Brothers for an “IT literate” anti-piracy intern in the UK. According to the posting, duties will include:<\/p>\n

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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The yearlong internship comes with a $26,500 salary, but it’s a risky job<\/a>, as Gizmodo points out. If your identity is uncovered, “you have, literally, the entire, worldwide community of pirates pissed at you.”<\/p>\n

That’s the downside to catching pirates — sometimes they catch you first.<\/p>\n



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Movie studios are looking for new tactics against illegal file-sharing and other copyright infringement, from hiring young, tech-savvy turncoats to taking legal action against digital pirates and the search engines they use. The increasingly aggressive moves reflect the growing severity of the industry’s global problem: Piracy is so commonplace in Spain that soon it may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3436,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-496009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3436"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}