London-based MUSO is one of these outfits. The company has been around for a few years already and has evolved into one of the most active senders of DMCA requests to Google.

Earlier this month MUSO broke the one million URL barrier in respect of their DMCA takedown requests, while charging their clients between 8 and 24 cents per link. However, the company has bigger plans and is developing a new technology to convert pirates into paying customers.

To fund this new technology the company applied for a “Smart Award” grant from the Government’s Technology Strategy Board. After a careful review of MUSO’s proposal the Government awarded the anti-piracy outfit £250,000.

MUSO director Christopher Elkins is delighted with the news and says that the money will eventually benefit the UK tech sector and copyright holders.

“The grant award gives our R&D team an extremely robust financial position from which to develop this ambitious and forward-thinking product, to the benefit of the UK tech sector, and rights holders looking for new ways to further drive the online growth of great content,” Elkins says.

The question is, however, to what degree the UK will benefit from the investment. A quick look at MUSO’s top clients based on Google’s Transparency Report shows only foreign copyright holders.

The top five consists of the Indian movie studio “Eros International”, Canadian based “Entertainment One”, the Dutch publisher “Meulenhoff Boekerij”, “Nuclear Blast” from Germany, and Norway’s “Nordisk Film Distribution Norway.”

Another prominent associate of MUSO is the Russian social network VKontakte, who signed an agreement earlier this year allowing the UK company to monitor and report uploads of copyrighted material.

How the new technology will convert pirates into paying customers remains a mystery for now. The company is said to be starting a trial in the second quarter of next year but further details are lacking.

TorrentFreak contacted MUSO for more details on their plans but we have yet to receive a response. Previously the company announced a browser addon which will allow people to report infringing torrent and cyberlocker links to the company, but these have yet to be released to the public.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In addition to the above techniques, anti-piracy company MUSO report they have developed a new method of gathering information on potentially infringing links and files.

The London-based outfit says that its new web browser plugin will enable any Internet user to report back the location of ‘pirate’ links or torrents whenever they appear in their web browser. The plugin will report how many files/links it has found before submitting them to the MUSO database.

“Cyberlocker, and similar download sites, do not generally allow direct searching so links are found through search engines, forums and blog sites that link back to the cyberlocker,” the company said in a statement. “MUSO’s ‘Anti-Piracy Assist Browser Plugin’ will use people power to help them protect their vast base of rights holders.”

We were interested to hear more details about this new product, such as how it will be able to differentiate ‘pirate’ files from those being distributed legitimately.

“The links found will feed into the MUSO system which already has robust systems in place for correctly matching only illegal content links to our client’s products,” MUSO Technical Director James Mason told TorrentFreak. “[We employ] a combination of automated matching algorithms, followed by a final human verification stage before any takedowns are issued.”

MUSO hopes that industry workers will install and use the plugin in a show of support for the music business although at this stage it appears that it will be open for anyone to use.

Of course, sending potentially infringing links could have legal implications so we quizzed MUSO on the privacy issues. Can users of the plugin be identified by the reports they send to MUSO and if not, will all users’ submissions be trusted as accurate?

“It’s fully anonymous and users won’t be identified in any way,” Mason told us.

“The links supplied don’t need to be trusted in any way, as it’s merely a way to make the MUSO system aware of a link. You can think of it as an extension to our existing crawler, rather than a user giving MUSO information about specific links belonging to specific products. Once the plugin or our existing crawler finds links, they are entered into our matching and verification process.”

No date has been set for the tool’s release but already it has piqued the interest of a developer in the file-sharing community. He told us that a people-powered link finding plugin with a few modifications might be useful to more people than just an anti-piracy company.

The tool will initially be available for Chrome with IE and Firefox support following “in the near future.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.