Operating Methods
Web Sheriff uses proprietary software and web-crawler programs to search the Internet, using human auditing to determine the type of site that is posting its clients' copyrighted material. It relies heavily on phone calls and relationship building and when locating unauthorized links it targets the persons running the sites. The supposed offending party is sent a take-down notice before further action is taken. Some Torrent sites and file sharing sites such as Mediafire and Rapidshare provide access to the anti-piracy company to remove infringing content itself.
The Los Angeles Times described the company's approach as representing "a sharp turn in the recording industry's life-and-death struggle with piracy, one driven largely by performers and their managers rather than the record companies." When it contracts to protect new music releases, the company encourages the artists it represents to give fans several tracks ahead of the release. The company then prepares for the "virtually inevitable" pre-release leak, and when it does occur, fans on blogs are approached with a polite request for copyrighted material to be removed, while providing the fans with the free official tracks and clips from the artist and record label.
Read more about this topic: Web Sheriff
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