Or do you think there's enough people out there that report them for free....that they wouldn't need to hire people? I'm trying to figure out something I'm good at, that I could actually make money off of. Comic book and Star Trek trivia isn't cutting it so far.
Probably can be done by using software matching of titles, pattern recognition and comparison of video and sound, and then having someone examine the matching items.
Yeah, the big boys use a combination of automated search bots, link reporting by Internet users, and staff who are paid to hunt down infringing material. Oh, they also crap up torrents and report people to their ISPs with DMCA notices.
Instead of being an internet narc, look into social media marketing. Companies hire eager young people for chump change to boost various products on sites like this, well probably more hig profile sites but you get the idea. Not well paid but fun and who knows where it might lead?
A guy I know is a game tester. Exactly, he gets paid for playing games. Pays the bills just fine. I know! Me too!
Game testing is not as fun as people think it is...it's basically doing the same damn thing over and over and over and over to lock down where a problem is. The polar opposite of fun. But a lot of jobs are like that, right? If you want to do QA, you'd have less competition in any other sort of software.
It would be no surprise that record & movie companies would have whole departments dedicated to searching out pirating. That's their business, to sell their product, they're huge companies for the most part and take their profit margin very seriously. What I think is ridiculous is when they squawk about a 2 minute clip of something being posted on youtube. That's when it must be automated searchbots doing their job. I've posted minor segments of things on youtube, and because I got those clips straight from a DVD or blu-ray instead of capturing it off the TV directly, there is some coding there to allow those searchbots to see it. But the same clip I have may have been posted by several other people, they just didn't get it off a DVD, so theirs are left alone.
Yeah, QA of any product is not nearly as fun as people might think it is. Well, maybe it's fun with sex toys, I dunno. I would strongly advise anyone who wants to go into the video game industry against it. If you want to do software, do enterprise-level stuff. Everyone wants to make games, so game programmers are a dime a dozen and get worked to death, because you're supposed to be happy with the "prestige" of working for EA or BioWare or whoever. Look up the reviews of video game companies on GlassDoor. Horror stories everywhere. They're practically sweatshops.
But... but... the commercials show me two laid-back guys playing the game and just pointing the problems out to one another.