The Illegal Streaming Service Bigger Than Netflix, Hulu, And Prime Gets Conviction
Ever since the internet, there has been digital piracy, with a particular group of people living under convictions that information, knowledge, and culture should be free. We can debate whether or not there’s validity to those viewpoints, but we can all agree piracy has damaging effects as it constitutes theft. On this point, five men who ran an illegal streaming service called Jetflicks have been convicted by a federal jury.
Guilty
The Department of Justice just announced that Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi, and Peter Huber–who have been running Jetflicks–have been found guilty of piracy.
Authorities dubbed Jetflicks one of the largest unauthorized streaming services in the US, generating millions of dollars in illegal subscriptions, thanks to a library of content whose size overshadows those of Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Prime Video combined. The stolen content was distributed to thousands of paid subscribers.
Pirating From Pirates
This was achieved through computer scripts and software to scour pirate websites for copies of hundreds of thousands of TV episodes, which were then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers. The magic part of the whole thing is that the aforementioned group of co-conspirators made millions of dollars, basically stealing content from other digital pirates (who usually share it for free) and streaming it on their own platform to make a profit.
Dallmann Potentially Faces The Steepest Punishment
The jury convicted the previously mentioned group of “crimepreneurs” of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Additionally, Kristopher Dallmann was also convicted of two counts of money laundering by concealment and three counts of misdemeanor and criminal copyright infringement.
While the rest of his co-conspirators face a maximum penalty of five years in prison for the whole Jetflicks affair, Kristopher Dallmann could possibly spend a maximum of 48 years in prison. This is a developing story since the sentencing date still hasn’t been set.
Piracy Is Theft
The convictions made by the federal jury against those behind Jetflicks underscore the Criminal Division’s commitment to protecting the intellectual property rights of creators, artists, studios, and IP rights holders by prosecuting digital piracy schemes and bringing offenders to justice.
Digital piracy is a major concern, considering that it results in significant financial losses for content creators, companies, and entire industries, affecting the broader economy, including jobs and tax revenues, and negatively affecting innovation and creativity.
Piracy And Media Conservation
Piracy doesn’t affect television and cinematic content online; it affects all content, period, including stuff produced by the music and gaming industry. Not to mention that, often, such content comes with the risks of malware, viruses, and low-quality copies. But there’s also the other side of the coin.
We’re big on media preservation, and stuff is slowly going missing from streaming services. Digital piracy, for all of its adverse effects on the economy, is actually at the forefront of media preservation. It’s more than likely that Jetflicks had content that wasn’t present anywhere else (except in the coffers of other pirates).
Source: Fortune
