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Piracy

FBI Busts Massive Pirate Streaming Service With More Content Than Netflix (usatoday.com) 124

Posted by EditorDavid from the piracy-and-chill dept.
An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running two of the largest illegal television and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal officials... An FBI investigation led officials to Darryl Polo, 36, and Luis Villarino, 40, who have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges for operating iStreamItAll, a subscription-based streaming site, and Jetflix, a large illegal TV streaming service, federal officials said Friday.

With roughly 118,000 TV episodes and 11,000 movies, iStreamItAll provided members with more content than Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Vudu, according to prosecutors. Polo urged members of iStreamItAll via email to cancel licensed services in favor of pirated content, according to his plea agreement. He also admitted to earning $1 million from his piracy operations, officials said. He also admitted to downloading the content from torrent websites. "Specifically, Polo used sophisticated computer programming to scour global pirate sites for new illegal content; to download, process, and store these works; and then make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada," officials said.
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FBI Busts Massive Pirate Streaming Service With More Content Than Netflix More

FBI Busts Massive Pirate Streaming Service With More Content Than Netflix

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  • Not the exit they were looking for I presume (Score:5, Funny)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @10:41PM (#59522790)

    I guess an IPO is now out of the question.

    • TFA says they made $1 million.

      With their skills and creativity, they could have made $1M over the same timeframe by just getting a legal tech job in Silicon Valley.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Not the exit they were looking for I presume (Score:5, Funny)

        by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @04:52AM (#59523490)

        TFA says they made $1 million.

        With their skills and creativity, they could have made $1M over the same timeframe by just getting a legal tech job in Silicon Valley.

        And then spent $1 million on rent over the same time frame.

        • TFA says they made $1 million.

          With their skills and creativity, they could have made $1M over the same timeframe by just getting a legal tech job in Silicon Valley.

          And then spent $1 million on rent over the same time frame.

          Unless you suck it up and commute. Commute sucks but there are people out there sucking it up to minimize cost. Not a great strategy for the long term (specially if you want to plan to have a family), but it makes damned sense to do so for several years IIF one lands a very lucrative job in the valley.

          It's all a matter of planning and priorities. Don't want a commute? Then pay up a shitload of money plus a kidney. Don't want to pay up a shitload of money and a kidney? Then suck it up with a murder commute

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Crunchyroll ... investment drew criticism from anime distributors and licensors Bandai Entertainment and Funimation as the site continued to allow users to upload illegal copies of licensed titles.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Damn, these guys sound real bad. String em up!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      Damn, these guys sound real bad. String em up!

      "Spohisticated programming" is probably law-enforcement code for "Sonarr / Radarr with Jackett and some really good Indexers added". Can't make it sound too easy or it will encourage copycats.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I have bad news for you. There is souce code in most languages to parse an .m3u8 file and source code in all languages known to parse an #EXT file for the .ts segments of the .mp4 video. All streaming video services uses the extact same files to stream video. The #EXT file will even tell you which version of the #EXT file it is.

        Go to any network streaming video service, ABC, CBS, NBC, Discovery, A&E, PBS, Netflix, Hulu... view a streaming video and click on developer tools or press F12 in any browser
        • To entertain the idea I tested this in Netflix to see if this works, and the end result did not exactly hold up as you specified.

    • Programming a computer to automate common tasks? Heresy!

      Computers should only be programmed by authorized corporations that wish to steal and resell our private information.

  • Information wants to be free!
    • Even if the court would be at all charitable to such an argument, he'd have a hard time arguing why he made $1 million off of that information.

      • 1. Get Content.
        2. Pay for it. LEFT OUT THIS STEP.
        3. Charge for it.
        4. Deliver it.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AK Marc ( 707885 )
          Might as well have step to be "become God". It's easier and cheaper than licensing content. Anyone smaller than Netflix and they won't even return your call to tell you "no".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msauve ( 701917 )
        Libre, not beer.

      • Even if the court would be at all charitable to such an argument, he'd have a hard time arguing why he made $1 million off of that information.

        Beacause hookers and dealers don't accept information as payment.

  • The Spotify of video (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bifurcati ( 699683 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @10:43PM (#59522798) Homepage
    This was the role that Netflix originally (spiritually if not practically) fulfilled - a one-stop shop. And people are willing to pay for it - as demonstrated here, and also with Spotify. It's hard to see, however, how you can get [back] to that model with TV/movies!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      Netflix added streaming in the US, ad offers only streaming most other places. They should, rather than focusing on streaming, start going "backwards" to a disk-based service in more markets. That way, they can fill the missing spots when companies like Disney "feud" with them.

      • Re:The Spotify of video (Score:5, Interesting)

        by hjf ( 703092 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @12:42AM (#59523080) Homepage

        Some truths of the modern world, which might shock you:

          - Physical content is dead. Most people don't WANT to buy or rent DVDs.
          - Many houses nowadays don't have a working DVD player, and most houses never had a BD player
          - Children under 10 don't even know how to operate disk based media
          - Most houses no longer have a desktop computer. Many don't even have a computer at all (the boom you see in those "streaming" services, given how easy it is to torrent, is the fact that they consume media in their phones, and need it delivered to the walled garden most phones are)
          - Disney $media (VHS, DVD, and now Disney+) are no longer your kids' babysitter. Youtube is. There are channels dedicated to children with literally BILLIONS of plays, ranging from well-produced goofy acting from russian kids, to an incredibly high viewcount of toy unboxing videos.
          - Netflix is even putting the pirate DVD sellers out of business: here in Argentina pirate DVD sellers are a dying trend. Netflix fills that, even for lower-middle class and, shockingly enough, "upper" lower classes as well (they share passwords though).
          - The same people as above actually now pay for Youtube Premium (the family plan costs about half of what a mcdonald's combo costs) because they are sick of seeing ads on their smart TVs and Chromecasts.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by nagora ( 177841 )

          There are literally a dozen places that I know of selling DVDs in my home town in the UK; they're not doing it as a hobby.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by eepok ( 545733 )

          There is some exaggeration in this post.

          1. While most people don't want to buy or rent DVDs, physical media is not dead. People prefer not having to get up to pull a DVD out of a library and insert it in a player to see a movie now that they've acclimated to streaming video, but absent a guarantee that the streaming service to which one subscribes will ALWAYS host the products, a person who wants that video on-demand will continue to purchase physical media. I even (over time) ripped by DVD library in stand

        • Physical content is dead. Most people don't WANT to buy or rent DVDs.

          Redbox, a DVD rental kiosk company, just sold for $1.6 billion. I buy DVDs if I know I'll want to view the movie/show in 10 years. So, mostly classics. Of course, if it's a one-off rental, I'd rather stream it.

          Many houses nowadays don't have a working DVD player, and most houses never had a BD player

          The market penetration of XBox One and Playstation would like to have a word with you about BD. And old consoles are chiming in on the DV

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AK Marc ( 707885 )
          1. Millions of people are still buying DVDs
          2. Are you counting all the houses with gaming consoles?
          3. my 3 year old will go to the DVD shelf, pick a movie he wants, take it to the player and put it in. Yes, we know you are dumber than a 3 year old.
          4. As desktops fell, laptops increased. I note you said "desktop computer" as if you know that a PC is in most houses. You are deliberately lying, or were trying to exclude the infinitesimal edge case of houses with Chromebooks without a PC.
          5. yes. Because You

    • Re: The Spotify of video (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thereitis ( 2355426 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @01:30AM (#59523174) Journal

      Look at the fiasco of UFC 245. People having to go to 3 different channels to see everything. Content blocking so non-US customers can't even BUY the content, even those who have a monthly membership! I always pay for what I watch but I had no qualms about making other arrangements in this case.

  • One question: Why risk this? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @10:44PM (#59522800) Journal

    As someone who was put through the wringer back in the early 1990's over some accusations I hosted pirated software on a hobby BBS that cost more to run each month than any users ever donated in funds? I guess I find it hard to fathom that anybody would actually try streaming copyrighted movies and TV shows as a commercial service, actually advertising it like it was a legitimate company, and think they could get away with it?

    I mean, we're talking the FBI putting effort into coming after me over a total user-base of maybe 100 or so people, back in the day when the general public didn't even understand what a BBS was, versus running an illegal competitor to Netflix or Hulu with global reach and earnings in the $1 million range! You better believe they'd come for you.

    • "earnings in the $1 million range"
       
      Is that a serious question? Some people will kill for $50.

    • Once they were making money off subscriptions, it was basically game-over.

    • Maybe this person is related to the one who was pilfering $80k out of the bank at which he worked and Instagramming pictures of him with all the money...

    • Jetflix had been doing it for close to a decade, and I was a paying customer a long time ago. I guess they just flew under the radar. I had always been kind of suspicious of the legitimacy of their content, but they said it was legit and never got shut down, so who could know at the time?

    • to get a plea deal of 1 mil while keeping the othe (Score:5, Informative)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @12:25AM (#59523042) Homepage Journal

      to get a plea deal of 1 mil while keeping the other 3, pretty much. once the numbers get big enough the game kinda changes.

      remember that shutdown of a couple of rom sites a while ago by nintendo? they paid a bunch of cash to nintendo and shut down. the cash was estimated to be less than earnings from running the sites. they ran the sites for nearly 2 decades, all of it was for profit monetized with intrusive ads(also malware ads).

      Whats strange in this story is that they ran the operation while staying _in_ USA and having the servers in Canada. why not run the servers from mexico, taiwan, hong kong or whatever? why risk staying in USA and not go into some place like vietnam or thailand to run it through proxies?

      also in the bigger cases it's not that unheard of that .. well, that they make a plea deal thats got a cash back statement on it. the purpose is to make for headlines like paid damages of 50 million or whatever, while paying 1 mil. the studios(mpaa,riaa) view the headline as the thing they want, not the cash.

      do I have any proof offhand for these numbers? not really no. so just treat this info as a rumor. it also used to that pirate sites actually got the most actual flak and damages for stealing bandwidth(servers at universities and such, calling card fraud and all that) not so much for the actual pirated content(the call card fraud etc the telecoms viewed directly as lost money, the stolen bandwidths usually viewed as an authority issue by university etc admins).

      it's probably the flow of cash that the feds got them with too.
      ----------

      also in the 90s the cops didn't really know shit about anything and had no idea whatsoever what was serious cybercrime and what wasn't serious cybercrime. I had my computers confiscated for 2.5 _years_ in the late 90s with no chargers raised in the end at all. I did some stupid stuff back then(basically what was scriptkiddie stuff with rootshell.org scripts and such and fxping warez and what have you) but they thought I did some other stupid stuff that I didn't actually do. was any of that really serious enough to bust me in middle of school day and confiscate most (not all!) computers including some floppies from the floor and shit? not really. but it's not like they had done any such cases before that.

      also if you ever get busted by cops anywhere be very sure to read the transcript of the questioning _very_ _very_ carefully before signing it. cops are used to druggies and such and they will just put in a confession into the transcript even if you didn't actually confess to anything when speaking. mine had a confession to something technically impossible before I told them that nope I want this changed. . I mean the cops doing the questioning didn't even know what was possible, but put it in there anyway that I agreed to having done all of it. the usual druggie, or someone with social anxiety just from whatever, coming down just wants to get out of the situation of the interview/questioning.

      • HACK THE PLANET!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Socguy ( 933973 )
        Cops are legally allowed to outright lie during interrogations. The first and only words out of your mouth should be asking for a lawyer. Even if they make it seem like just a friendly interview, it's not. Even if they insist that asking for a lawyer make you seem like you have something to hide, don't say anything. ANYTHING you say can be twisted to fit whatever narrative they're concocting. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking you can outsmart the cops because if they want you to be guilty, they c
    • 1 million is a spare change for those companies. It's more of question of availability and exclusivity. Paying clients of theirs would feel ripped off if wage slaves could see it. FBI would more likely come for someone who's easily catch too, most likely someone who was directly reported to them. Nonetheless they never can catch everyone so they'll settle for excessively punishing only those few who they catch in order to intimidate the rest.

  • More content than Netflix? How hard can that be? (Score:5, Informative)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @10:56PM (#59522840)

    With the scattering of all exclusive content over +100 streaming services, getting more content than Netflix is something you achieve on your first day as a pirate.

    • Only if you're a slow learner.

      Not pick nits but, when are real piratate takes the plunder, owners no longer have the loot. Not the case here. Here, we just have someone selling tickets to the show but not sharing profit. Sharing the show isn't the crime here, not sharing the profit is.

      Only one million profit in 10 years collecting from Joe6pack [who is happy to pay comcast 200 a month for less service], no way. The other question one must ask is WTF would any business be stupid enough to store the result of

  • I had a sub to jetflix like 10 years ago and was suspicious of their ability to get premium cable shows like stuff from HBO/Showtime. I guess my suspicions were well placed...

    • Yep... this resembles recent TV streaming site Aereo. Mainstream content, which they didn't license.

      • Not really, not even remotely close. Aereo had one antenna per user, and they were effectively leasing use of the antenna and receiver for an OTA signal that one could otherwise get themselves. Jetflix let you download a good quality mp4 of copyrighted work without DRM and keep it for perpetuity.

        • The "small antenna" was fiction... while they tried to keep everything in-market they were really just a streaming site.

          • Re: So it /was/ illegal the whole time... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by lgw ( 121541 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @12:28AM (#59523050) Journal

            There's something deeply wrong with the copyright model when it's illegal to rebroadcast anything that was ever broadcast.

            • There a lot of things deeply wrong with how the US economy is structured. Looking locally make one wonder how its even possible to argue that this should be allowed until you realize they extend these policies onto the rest of the world to make up for our massive trade deficit.

            • There's something deeply wrong with the copyright model when it's illegal to rebroadcast anything that was ever broadcast.

              How so? Note I'm picking on the specific term here: rebroadcast. This implies playing something for the benefit of other. Are you saying that you think it would be okay to just record a cable TV channel and then replay it with a 10 second day (rebroadcast) while charging a few cents less and paying nothing to the people who broadcast the original piece?

              How is that not the same as blatant copying, for profit of anything? Should I be able to make a 100% identical iPhone and sell it without legal repercussions

  • "With roughly 118,000 TV episodes and 11,000 movies"

    Seriously people, if you are going to run a pirate streaming service you can do better than this.

    Did you even look into foreign content?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Alphabet Agencies Need to Look Relevant (Score:3)

    by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @11:28PM (#59522940)
    With no terrorists to go after might as well pop some guys downloading Rick and Morty. Don't want those billions of dollars in funding to look like its being wasted. Probably ran out of guys in basements looking at pics of 17 year olds to bust that day.

  • Thou shalt not provide fixes for market failures. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Providing free fixes for obvious holes in the market for the the shared community is FORBIDDEN. It shall be PUNISHED SEVERELY.

    The market will instead BUNDLE, it will EXCLUDE, it will MANIPULATE market segments.

    Because we have learned NOTHING from the era of the Robber Barons, or at least nothing that we aren't willing to forget in the name of stock prices.

    The public interest does not exist. Insult anyone that insists that it should be respected. Mock them - and respect all seekers of rent - for all forms

    • Look, those copyright cartel companies paid a LOT of money for those laws. Are you suggesting they shouldn't get their money's worth?

  • ask to do the time in Canada!

  • FUD (Score:2)

    by fred911 ( 83970 )

    FTA ''One of the platforms reportedly had more paying subscribers than Netflix, Hulu and other popular licensed streaming platforms.''

    https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]

    ''In the third quarter of 2019, Netflix had over 158 million paying streaming subscribers worldwide as well as over 5.5 million free trial customers. Of these subscribers, 60.62 million were from the United States.''

    So how do you only make 1 million dollars... or am I bad at math.

  • Looks like this guy is admitting to a lot of stuff. I'm guessing he didn't retain a lawyer.

  • I have seen several posts from users on the Plex reddit, implying they're basically selling access to their Plex library like some kind of Netflix - several of these posts. I don't know if it's genius or stupidity.
    It seems like a very risky, foolish move to me but I do like money, so I sympathise with doing idiot stuff when money flows in.

    Still, very dumb - dunno if that's what these 2 did, but what a crazy thing to do.

  • Hmmmm...

    Just think about that for a second Hollywood execs and legit streaming companies, 2 guys organised and operated a collective, subscription based streaming service that gave people exactly what they wanted and people paid...they paid a shed load of cash for it! Alright, they did it without permission and yes they needed to be stopped as it was illegal but just 2 guys ran it. With all the thousands of resources, people and lawyers the top 5 streaming and production companies have at their disposal and

    • The idea works in a world where the costs of developing, creating, and distributing content clash with the way a one stop shop works. The studios tried to work with Netflix, but their costs were not being met by their idea of a fixed fee model. That's why they finally decided to create their own streaming services, because it was better suited to their cost structures. The lawyers get involved because there is no global agreement that would satisfy the regulations of different areas. What works in the U

  • Because Netflix has been losing titles (Score:3)

    by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @06:47AM (#59523662)

    People do want a "one stop shop". They don't want to pay enough to make it a successful business, because all that accumulated storage and indexing and bandwidth to provide the uploads costs money. This is the fundamental flaw of Eric Swarz's attempts to simply copy JSTOR and "make information free". It wasn't his to copy, he had no resources to keep it organized, and it was the _organization_ and reliable access to very obscure, low volume content that make JSTOR valuable.

    Netflix's problem is only partly the pirates, it's the flood of other "streaming services" who've flooded the market and made a one-stop-shop impossible.

    • netflicks and hulu actually brought piracy down.then the flood of me to crap started and piracy returned to normal. the content holders only have themselves to blame.

      • As a pirate since the data of trading games on copied audio tape, I agree fully. Netflix, along with other legal services like Spotify, iTunes and Steam, really hurt piracy. We lost a lot of users to the lure of convenience. Most people don't pirate just to save money - they do it for the sake of convenience, because it's easier to grab a torrent than to order a box set that will take a week to arrive and spend years sitting on the shelf after you've watched it.

        With the increasing fragmentation of legal pro

  • MPAA has the US government as its own copyright police. It's not a question of IF but WHEN you'll get busted.

  • Just why? Who are the idiots who were paying for streaming pirated content?

    That's like the first rule of the 1997 edition of the Internet Pirates Handbook; don't pay someone for your warez because that defeats the entire purpose. Your internet connection doesn't count...but paying for streaming piracy? Did a millennial write the new handbook?

    "Like, OMG you guise! You pay but you don't pay. It's so cool."

  • My 2000's blu-ray collection had more good content than Netflix.

  • The public does not want to be confused with 30,000 different streaming services, and wants to get all of their content from one place.

      Right now, there is a vacuum for that and somebody else will come along, build and build a new pirate site. They will learn from their predecessors mistake and make sure it's done where American law cannot touch it.

      Of course, the companies can band together and do this themselves and legit, but we all know that will not happen.

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