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from the why-have-one-cheap-service-with-everything-when-you-could-have-117? dept.
Eight individuals have been charged with an indictment by the United States for allegedly running two of the "largest unauthorized streaming services".
The federal grand jury that gave the indictment alleges that the two streaming services, Jetflicks and iStreamItAll (ISIA), caused copyright owners to lose millions of dollars.
Both services were used by tens of thousands of subscribers, and could be accessed online and on numerous systems including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, video game consoles, digital media players, set-top boxes, and web browsers.
Jetflicks allegedly obtained infringing television programs from pirate websites -- such as The Pirate Bay, RARBG and Torrentz -- by using automated computer scripts, and then would provide the pirated content to subscribers soon after the shows were aired.
ISIA allegedly used many of the same automated tools that Jetflicks employed to locate, download, process, and store illegal content -- but ISIA also provided movies in addition to television programs -- to quickly make pirated content available to ISIA subscribers.
The two services allegedly reproduced tens of thousands of copyrighted television episodes and movies without authorization, the Justice Department said, and distributed the infringing programs to tens of thousands of paid subscribers located throughout the US and Canada.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 29 2019, @02:55PM
Not going to work. That first copy is way too expensive for that model. Even an unedited novella takes more than a month of effort to write. Then there's all the other work involved in editing and publishing the book.
This whole business of complaining about distribution is mostly a way of rationalizing piracy. Part of what drives people to write books for free is the hope of it becoming a best seller and making them rich.
Yes, the system needs to be fixed, but paying people to write books in this fashion isn't going to work. The system already advances most of the payments to cover the production, this just removed any hope of profit in the venture