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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @07:28AM (1 child)
I can understand running such a business in Russia or similar but doing it in the USA so publicly would be stupid unless they've managed to stash enough of the money away and can somehow just get one or two years in prison (or even community service ;) ).
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday December 16 2019, @07:41PM
Russia is run by a KGB officer, remember? Criminals don't like such an environment. Just saying...
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.