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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, 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.