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Feds Break Up Illegal Streaming Network That Dwarfs Netflix and Hulu Libraries
Two of the minds behind the nation's largest pirate streaming services, iStreamItAll and Jetflicks, have pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement charges, federal officials said Friday. Now we all can rest easier knowing there are a few less bad actors getting one over on multi-billion-dollar giants like Netflix and Disney.
A federal grand jury indicted the two men, Darryl Julius Polo, 36, and Luis Angel Villarino, 40, along with six other co-defendants back in August after feds busted their purported headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada. In his plea agreement, Polo told DOJ officials that his illicit subscription-based service, iStreamItAll, offered more than 118,000 television episodes and 10,000 movies. Both men also admitted to working as computer programmers for Jetflicks, another Las Vegas-based streaming service that Villarino claimed hosted close to 200,000 pirated TV episodes.
All that adds up to more content than Hulu, Netflix, Vudu, and Amazon Prime combined, according to prosecutors. And all of it pirated from some of the world's most-frequented torrent sites, circumventing copyright owners' consent and cheating them out of what the DOJ estimates could amount to millions of dollars.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @07:25AM (6 children)
It might also have been the network's profits, through whatever they did to monetize the viewers (you may safely assume that they didn't do it for charity ...).
That doesn't change anything else of what you said, though.
Adding insult to injury: for the *customers* they sure as hell had the better experience. Basically free instead of >100$ a month, yet still more content than that money could possibly buy, all bundled in one single, very convenient portal.
I, personally, would possibly even pay for that ...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday December 16 2019, @09:26AM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday December 16 2019, @05:43PM
'eh, I have a Netflix account with 1 physical disc and online streaming for $20 a month. If it's not on Netflix, we don't watch it. Also, Netflix isn't the super giant mega corporation that is Amazon. Netflix did kill off Blockbuster, so I still call them the good guys.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Monday December 16 2019, @06:34PM
Well I think noncommercial copyright infringement should be legal.
But, actually charging people for someone else's work: That's pretty fucked up!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @02:30PM (2 children)
And, of course, the MAFIA will not recognize the moral to the story here.
Your customers want a single, low cost, portal where everything is available on demand. Provide that, and you'll see the pirate streaming sites fade until they are a mere shadow of what they were.
You'll never be rid of them, but when they are 0.1% of your viewership, you can effectively ignore them.
But your customers do not want seventeen plus different portals, each with a different crappy UI, that they have to look through, individually, to find out where item X has moved to today after the latest rounds of licensing deals. They want a "one-stop-shop" that is reasonably priced.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @03:56PM (1 child)
People also want free lunches, provided by someone else, that are pleasing to the palate and nutritious. Or, don't you think that if someone could reasonably figure out a way to provide such a one-stop portal that it wouldn't win? Don't you think that if the content rights holders could make more out of allowing a one-stop deal that they wouldn't go for that instead?
I'm no fan of trusting the market to provide for things, but I think that's safe in this case.
A very easy way to have ensured this would have been to ensure that rights holders cannot also be content providers. That horse left the barn so long ago that it is now impossible to close the door on it.
The other moral lesson to be learned: People will always find a way to bootleg at a lower cost. Or perhaps more simply: Theft will always happen. Which doesn't mean theft should therefore be decriminalized.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @04:54PM
No, because they don't want to be the wholesaler and receive wholesale rates. They want to be the one and only monopoly retailer for their own content and therefore receive retail rates (inflated at that due to the exclusivity of the monopoly).
They are trying, desperately, to shove the square peg of retail rates through the smaller round hole of wholesale rates. With the result that they incentivize the very activity they want to eliminate.
Yep, that would have likely been a simple fix.
Also true, they have more than enough money now to purchase the necessary politicians to maintain their grasp on both sides of the create and distribute pipeline.