Dozens Of AOL's Patch Sites Include Links To TV, Movie Piracy Web Sites

One of the certainties of the Internet is that if you allow visitors to post on your web site, someone will inevitably figure out a way to make money abusing their privileges. Especially once they realize that no one is paying any attention to the posts.

That's certainly the case on dozens of the web sites sites run by hyper-local news company Patch.com. A search of the sites on Monday found numerous listings and links to sites offering illegal downloads and streaming of movies ranging from "Fast And Furious 6" to "Iron Man 3." There are also a number of listings pointing to places where visitors can watch TV shows such as HBO's "Game of Thrones."

Each of the local Patch web sites offers visitors the opportunity to "become a Patch Blogger," which allows the user to create blog posts for the site. I assumed that either the site's local editor or someone else would at least glance at the posts to make sure they were appropriate. But apparently that isn't the case, based on the large number of these piracy-related blog posts that appear on Patch sites scattered throughout the network.

I suspect someone is using an automated tool to help with the posts, since some of them include all the relevant keywords, but not a link where the movie or TV file can be found.

I've been unable to determine how many of these posts are currently live, but it only took a few minutes to find several dozen posts on as many local Patch web sites.

To be fair to Patch, this is a problem that plagues any web site that allows users to post on the site. But it's an easy enough problem to fix and all it requires is to have someone manually look at each post before it goes live on the site.

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