Going Legal

Going Legal
Pirating takes skill. In a generation that has grown up with P2P (peer-to-peer) sharing and ISPs (internet service providers), it’s so easy to share files, download torrents, or rip songs from CDs. Pirating is almost like second nature. The skill comes with knowing where to look and how to get good quality.

According to www.podcastingnews.com, the average college student’s iPod has approximately $800 worth of pirated songs on it. This high number is based off a survey done a few years ago by The Times (UK), which states that “half of 14 to 24-year-olds were happy to share all the music on their hard drive, enabling others to copy hundreds, or thousands, of songs at any one time.”

But mastery of those skills belongs to the pirate tycoons. One college student in Grand Rapids, MI—we’ll call him John—has collected 1.2 terabytes of video and over 150 gigabytes of music over the past twelve years. His friend has over 6 terabytes. And that’s not even mentioning software. “I consider myself a Napster child,” he says. John also uses torrents and his college’s network, with which he can “grab stuff off of other people” via the shared folder system, transferring sometimes hundreds of songs, TV shows, and movies overnight. “It’s usually done by morning,” he says. The problem is finding good quality, and John usually settles for Apple Lossless files—almost identical to a .wav file in sound quality, and better than an .mp3—when he downloads music.

Pirating is not limited to music or films, though. Michigan is one of the top 6 states guilty of pirated software, says The Huffinton Post (April 9, 2011). Serious pirates go after software like the Adobe CS5 Master Suite (retail price: $2500), Autodesk Maya (retail price: $4370), or anti-virus programs. But apart from internet adventures in one’s free time, what do people do with those pirate skills? Even small-time pirates without as much experience as John still have the know-how to sail the internet and search for buried treasure. The end result is a lot of students with a lot of skills that don’t really have a place in the legal job sphere.
Or do they?

Although pirating skills may not be enough by themselves, when they are combined with programming, computing, web design, web operation, and a “functional understanding of computer crime statutes and copyright law”—according to an MPAA job announcement (pdf)—there are some very real career opportunities out there.

Internet investigators, or “trackers”, are employed by companies to conduct investigations and report on “global Internet targets engaged in the unauthorized dissemination of member content”, whether that’s via streaming or P2P protocols, says the MPAA announcement. It doesn’t matter if it’s with MPAA, ICE, or private companies; these investigators carry out their searches for pirated media and software on a global scale, develop strategy, analyze and track broadband usage, and work with law enforcement (state or federal). And knowing where to look is a big plus.

Last July, Warner Bros. offered an anti-piracy internship to IT-savvy college students. The internship was open only to UK applicants and paid a £17,500 salary for the entire 12 months. Students were expected to maintain BitTorrent accounts, monitor site traffic, keep their eyes out in forums for pirate-related groups or activities, develop and maintain link-scanning bots, make trap purchases, and carry out other anti-piracy tasks. So far there is no equivalent to this in the US, but it is likely only a matter of time.

Other positions with MPAA and ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) involve working against cyber crime in general. For ICE, this includes piracy but also identity theft, smuggling, illegal cyber-banking, drug trafficking, and child abuse images. For MPAA, careers also extend to IT development, site security, and research.

Meredith Segur, a career counselor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, admits she’s “never been asked before” about job opportunities for people with pirating skills. After a moment, though, she rattles off a list of possibilities: being a consultant for music or film companies, working with private companies to catch pirates, developing software that makes pirating more difficult, being an information security officer for a company, computer programming, developing more sophisticated technology that would make it less easy to pirate, and so forth. She suggested having a good base in computer programming, information security, or software development.

But turning to the legal side is a big step. The pirating community’s response, especially to the Warner Bros. internship, has been negative for the most part. Pirates who leave the “Dark Side” are branded as traitors or sell-outs. Some pirates view these jobs as a great opportunity to double-cross companies and do pirating on the side. Others support it simply because the jobs will train the generation of tomorrow how to pirate undetectably and build stealthier systems, now that they know the companies’ search strategies. Sabotage and spying aside, only a small minority see these jobs as legitimate opportunities for “pruning” out bad torrent sites or making “easy money.”

Not the best publicity to go on. But legally-speaking, pirating is a crime, and crimes tend to be against the law. On the practical side of things, there is nowhere else to use those awesome pirate skills. Legally, that is. Pirating is fun, let’s admit it. But court cases and moral issues suddenly mean a lot more if you’re raising kids, working two jobs, and paying rent. So a job that uses pirate skills and pays? And it’s legal? Couldn’t hurt to look into it.

As for John (you remember that student from before?), he’s using Netflicks now. “Usually the quality is better than the internet,” he says, and he doesn’t have to waste time finding movies.

-Katie Holtrop

graphic: (from www.labnol.org)