Illegal Netflix, Amazon Streamers Cut Off After European Arrests (bloomberg.com) 66
European police busted an illegal streaming ring that provided service to 2 million people and was so sophisticated that it had its own customer-service team. From a report: The criminal network operated for over five years and offered more than 40,000 channels, movies, documentaries and other content, according to European police coordination agency Europol. The scale of the operation shows how the big streaming platforms still struggle to deal with content theft as criminals find new ways to hack their anti-piracy systems. The group offered a technical assistance service and high standards of quality control, earning an estimated 15 million euros ($17 million) through PayPal payments, bank transfers and cryptocurrencies, the agency said. The threat to legal streaming may grow if Netflix, Walt Disney Co. and others gradually raise prices in coming years to capitalize on their fast-growing subscriber bases and viewers seek out cheaper, illegal alternatives.
Five years? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can something like that operate for five years? You have open payments to follow, you have streaming to locate IP's, anybody can open an account... It should be an investigation lasting five weeks, at most, not five years.
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How can something like that operate for five years?
Because most law enforcement is local to a city or county. Some law enforcement is at the state/provincial/national level.
But the victims here are Netflix and Amazon, which aren't even on the same continent.
So why should European police care? Even if they did, who has jurisdiction? What politician is going to get reelected because this was prosecuted?
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It should be a civil matter, and the cost of prosecution should fall on Netflix and Amazon, not European taxpayers.
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Re:Five years? (Score:4, Informative)
Copyright infringement is not stealing. Sane countries know that distinction and have very different laws for these different illegal practices.
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Copyright infringement is not stealing. Sane countries know that distinction and have very different laws for these different illegal practices.
I think because you are getting something for free that you're legally supposed to be paying for, that people tend to call it stealing.
It's actually fairly accurate, whether you like that or not.
Re:Five years? (Score:4, Insightful)
OR, you could view stealing as depriving an owner of a particular thing, in which case copyright infringement is in no way at all stealing.
Focus on the act instead of the perpetrator.
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You sell widget A.
I tell people not to buy widget A, and buy widget B instead.
People buy widget B.
By your logic, I have just "stolen" from you.
Your argument does not hold water. Copyright infringement is not theft.
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It's a very murky grey area because although Netflix would argue that they were deprived of income in fact a lot of consumers do that to them anyway by selecting a different billing location. For example YouTube Premium or whatever it's called now is about £12/month, but if you just use a VPN to sign up in Russia or India or Brazil you can get it for £2/month or even less.
They can scream fraud but consumers look at it as why should they pay over 5x as much when Mr. Singh over there d
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Here, this video explains the difference in a very simple, easy to understand way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Even a complete moron like you should be able to understand that they're not even remotely similar.
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I think because you are getting something for free that you're legally supposed to be paying for, that people tend to call it stealing.
It's actually fairly accurate, whether you like that or not.
The problem with your reasoning is that we all know copyright law is corrupt and is based on defrauding the public in the first place. Much of this stuff should or would be in the public domain anyways.
I'm just so tired of affluent shills who shout corporate propaganda out as if it were truth.
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I'll try your logic in reverse by going to steal the crown jewels and telling them it was just copyright infringement to get a lesser sentence and so that I don't have to give the goods back.
I'll let you know how it goes. Or not, because it would be stealing, and that's different to copyright infringement.
Whether you like that or not.
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I challenge you to show me a law that defines it like that. I guess the reason why laws ain't defined like that is that laws have no concept of what you "should" pay for.
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Really? You don't care if someone steals your stuff?
That depends on what stuff is stolen, and by whom.
Do you imagine that if Sony Music recorded one of my songs and refused to credit me or pay me, the police in my country, or any country would attempt a prosecution against them?
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Normal copyright violations are civil offenses. It is up to you to sue the infringer.
Egregious or large-scale commercial infringement, especially when it involves counterfeiting, is sometimes prosecuted via the criminal justice system.
Copyright infringement [wikipedia.org]
Re: Five years? (Score:2)
Theft of private property is not prosecuted. At least not for individual citizens in the Netherlands, nor small businesses. You have to be Shell, or apparently Netflix, to get police to do anything for you.
Police will file a report, dust for prints if relevant, then literally tell you youâ(TM)re unlikely to hear from them again.
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Prosecution, sure. Should private companies be able to obtain their own warrants and perform these investigations? The implications of that are worse than the idea of international cooperation.
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The company ought to have to pursue damages in civil court, like they would for libel (for instance).
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The company ought to have to pursue damages in civil court, like they would for libel (for instance).
And yet - how are they going to gather the proof? It's impossible without access to the things available in a criminal prosecution.
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Libel isn't usually private or kept secret. The evidence is the public statement + proof of the truth.
Re: Five years? (Score:2)
I still don't see why European police should care about this.
Primarily because European governments care if other nations steal content/patents which their own companies are generating. It's a give-and-take relationship. If you happen to live in a shitty country which creates and exports absolutely nothing of any value, then yeah, your government isn't going to give a shit if you steal the IP of other nations, and neither will the cops.
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However they aren't much faster if you look at cases where some of those dark web black markets, which operated out of their countries and sold products and services considered quite illegal by those governments. Those dark web black markets were operational for years as well before the executive acquired all the necessary warrants to raid them.
Hence don't attribute to malice which can be explained by incompetence.
It's mostly that the
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How can something like that operate for five years?
Because most law enforcement is local to a city or county. Some law enforcement is at the state/provincial/national level.
But the victims here are Netflix and Amazon, which aren't even on the same continent.
So why should European police care? Even if they did, who has jurisdiction? What politician is going to get reelected because this was prosecuted?
More importantly - there isn't really a European police. Europol [wikipedia.org] is an agency for coordination and cooperation of the national police in European Union member states, it doesn't do any investigations, prosecutions or arrests on its own. International investigations are a pain, and cost a lot of effort - and it needs to be startet from one of the member states.
PS: Police isn't directly run by politicians, and neither police chiefs or prosecutors are elected here. So popularity wouldn't factor into it.
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Police isn't directly run by politicians, and neither police chiefs or prosecutors are elected here.
Wherever 'here' is. In the USA, the police are definitely political. Whether elected or appointed.
What politician is going to get reelected because this was prosecuted?
Take a look at California as an example. Take money out of the mouths of poor, starving actors or studio heads and sufficient outrage can easily be generated to get doors kicked in. Maybe not so much in jurisdictions with much less skin in the motion picture business. On the other hand, I expect that France would be very responsive to cases where the label 'Champagne' is misused.
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Police isn't directly run by politicians, and neither police chiefs or prosecutors are elected here.
Wherever 'here' is. In the USA, the police are definitely political. Whether elected or appointed.
What politician is going to get reelected because this was prosecuted?
Take a look at California as an example. Take money out of the mouths of poor, starving actors or studio heads and sufficient outrage can easily be generated to get doors kicked in. Maybe not so much in jurisdictions with much less skin in the motion picture business. On the other hand, I expect that France would be very responsive to cases where the label 'Champagne' is misused.
The context in the article I replied to was European police, so "here" refers to Europe - even more specific, to European Union and associated countries.
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The head of the law enforcement task force probably wanted to finish watching GoT before they cracked down.
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And if he was as pissed about the end as most others who watched it were, it explains why he had to vent some steam and why this crack down worked the way it did.
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It should be an investigation lasting five weeks, at most, not five years.
I'd be very worried if within 5 weeks you were able to arrest multiple people in multiple countries search 15 homes sieze multiple luxury goods and freeze bank accounts in various nations. That in itself would be grounds to really REALLY question if due process was followed. Hell I expect it would take 5 weeks just to issue warrants for such a multinational effort. Europol isn't just some local police precinct.
Also there is probably an element of monitoring here. Is it better to just arrest the first person
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Simple. Who looses? Some irritating US companies that have the market cornered. These heroic European freedom fighters were only bothered when it become unavoidable.
How exactly is it in the interest of European countries to play copyright cops for US companies?
If only they learned anything from this (Score:5, Insightful)
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It is crazy how these unlicensed offerings were providing much better customer services than the legal ones.
Is it, though? Doing things legally are ALWAYS more expensive than doing them illegally. You used the word "licensed" here. Don't you think that license has costs associated with it? And those costs are taken from a pool that could otherwise pay employees.
Alos, the folks that were enganging in the illegal activity were surely pleased with the service, purely on the grounds that they're not paying full price.
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Almost like content licensing fees are way too high or something.
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Almost like content licensing fees are way too high or something.
Exactly and they are still making a very large profit so technically they are overcharging
Still from what I gather this service combined all the services effectively and didn't cut off shows and move them to another service kind of what Netflix started as
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Not if you get caught.
And of course if you are relying on the unlikelihood that you won't get caught to keep your expenses down in this regard, that is only achieving security through obscurity, which is known to be a flawed approach in principle
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And of course if you are relying on the unlikelihood that you won't get caught to keep your expenses down in this regard, that is only achieving security through obscurity, which is known to be a flawed approach in principle
Well, these guys did it for 5 years. The American government has been doing it since November 22, 1963.
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Uhm, what you've just described is *exactly* what security through obscurity is.
It's just an illusion of security that is created by the virtue of not being known about in the first place.
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Obscurity does not necessarily entail taking any extra effort to actually try and hide, but may be entirely dependent on being insignificant enough in something that might be plainly visible that no attention is drawn to it.
That is to say that Waldo might very well be in entirely plain sight if you knew exactly where to look, but that doesn't mean he's not effectively obscured by the distraction of all of the other content around him.
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It is crazy how these unlicensed offerings were providing much better customer services than the legal ones.
Based on what? The existence of technical support? If your streaming service requires this level of support it's usually evidence that you're doing something dodgy in the first place.
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To be fair Netflix is still a good quality service. No ads, no limits, decent UI and controls. I don't mind paying for it when they have something I want to watch, although that's less and less often since they lost their Marvel shows.
What were they doing? (Score:2)
Relay streaming or downloading the content then rebroadcasting on demand?
Re: What were they doing? (Score:1)
Pirates offer better features (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe these steaming companies should wake up and smell the coffee that pirates over BETTER features:
* Price = FREE
* No fucking ads!
Until they can at least match the convenience of piracy it isn't going away anytime soon. Hint: If you can't compete on price then you sure as hell need to compete on features -- and right now the convenience is REALLY nice for some people..
While I don't pirate I can at least understand the justifications and reasons why some might.
--
Only a spiritual moron kills an innocent animal as a sacrifice when the person broke a spiritual law. Death doesn't redeem a life -- Forgiveness does.
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Re: Pirates offer better features (Score:2, Redundant)
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This wasn't free. I'm pretty sure this is the that outfit called me and offered me a cheaper netflix+everythign package which they claimed was properly licensed.
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Until they can at least match the convenience of piracy it isn't going away anytime soon.
Erm that has passed a long time ago. If anything piracy briefly matched the convenience of streaming services when Popcorn Time was a thing allowing you to stream a library directly from BitTorrent, but for the most part Streaming services are hugely more convenient than pirating content.
Also there was nothing free about this pirated service. It just offered more content.
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Maybe these steaming companies should wake up and smell the coffee that pirates over BETTER features:
* Price = FREE
* No fucking ads!
I'd almost argue that those aren't necessarily the most compelling functions this service provided. I don't think people mind spending under $20/month for streaming services, and while ads are a tricky balance, I think a short preroll or postroll ad is tolerable to most.
No, the single biggest thing these guys offered was the de-balkanization of content. One service where you can watch Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, The Mandalorian, 11.22.63, Doctor Who, and Good Omens? You'd need half a dozen ser
Yeah (Score:2, Funny)
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You mean you think murderers, kidnappers, torturers, and rapists don't matter?
Your sarcasm detector is broken. Get it checked.
self inflicted. (Score:5, Insightful)
Digital Restrictions Management (Score:1)
Some people just don't like this. If you implement this, you will eventually lose. You will eventually have wasted all that money in licensing the DRM. Who ends up paying for that DRM? Right: the end user.
Just be smart, dump DRM.