Casey Chan - 

If you’re still pirating music, stop. It’s illegal and wrong and stealing and bad and yadda yadda. But it’s also dangerous because you don’t even know who you can trust anymore. There is no honor amongst thieves, record labels are using a task force of students to hunt down other students who pirate music.

EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner are funneling money to an anti-piracy group called proMedia whose sole purpose is to hunt down copyright infringements. That’s fine, record labels start anti-piracy groups all the time. What’s unique about proMedia though is that the company uses students to go after students. The company, according to one anonymous employee who works there, employs around 35 students who crawl and comb through forums, blogs and file hosting sites to find people who pirate music.

Even worse, the narc students track down other students who use P2P networks or BitTorrent and then force the pirate students to settle for thousands of dollars per offense with the evil record labels. Look, we know pirating is bad and people should stop but this is the digital equivalent of do good hall monitors ratting you out to teachers when you’re ditching class. Actually, it’s way more terrible and awful than that. Kids, stick together, protect each other and don’t ruin yourselves. [TorrentFreak via ZDNet, Image Credit Michelle D. Milliman/Shutterstock]