Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined
Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined
“substantial harm to television program copyright owners,”
Give me a fucking break
Love how they make this sound like some incredible feat. When you aren't bound to license agreements, turns out it's actually very easy to have a "massive" content library. Literally the only hurdle is storage space.
I mean, distributing it isn't a small feat. Plus you need to manage subscriptions, billings, CMS, a front end to navigate the content, etc.
That's no small amount of work, even if they used out of the box solutions for many layers.
Nobody gives a shit, you're not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.
This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after beating peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.
You're focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.
You're focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.
That's not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don't go after Trump. He's in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.
When cops only legal responsibility is to enforce the law, and the laws are written to protect corporate interests, of course they will stand outside the school and arrest protesters. SCOTUS has ruled that way so many times that "to serve and protect" is literally gaslighting.
Police don't even really have a duty to enforce the law, at least not in the USA:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
Say it again, friend.
Nobody gives a shit, you're not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.
This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after bearing peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.
You're focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.
"The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services"
They used the basic tools that most(?) pirates use today like sonarr and radar??
I don't mind people pirating...i do mind people pirating and profiting from redistribution.
Guessing they used Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent, maybe an NZB client....
Would you look at that, I'm sophisticated now.
Maybe even Jellyseerr
redistribution = service?
Why would they work for free?
Not gonna pretend like this aint illegal but i don't cry over some IP owners losing money... EVER, fuck 'em
Oh I don't care that the IP owner don't get money.
IDK, I just don't like the ethics of pirating media for profit, the entire idea is that it should be accessible to everyone, not just those with money. Cover your operational cost? Sure....Making millions in subscriptions? That is an asshole move IMO. If you're paying, you might as well pay the people who are making the media in the first place instead of some rando that had nothing to do with it.
Yes. Charging money for sharing content like that makes them little better than grifters
I run a massive streaming service too, which is also way bigger than all the streamers combined. It's just only distributed over my private home network. Jellyfin for the win!
Love my Jellyfin server, but I have 2 gripes over just using VLC.
Know of any fixes?
Are you playing directly on your server?
For the first one at least you could solve it by running JF with a Chromecast or similar device.
Feels cleaner than a wireless mouse in the living room too, IMO
JF won't boost volume past 100% like VLC.
For when you need to take it to 11
I don’t watch on my computer, that’s just where it’s hosted. I watch mostly on my AppleTV using Infuse (also great for other Apple products as well)
You can run your Jellyfin connection inside of Kodi which has a ton of configuration options like the volume control.
Use kodi for last mile?
VLC is great as a file playing app, terrible as a home server…
You might want to consider streaming it on your TV. Modern TVs should have a Plex app at the least. Or use a Chromecast or other setup. I watch on my couch with the TV remote. Its the same experience as watching Netflix.
What platform are you on that you need to use VLC?
Can’t use the scroll wheel for volume. It’s a pain aiming for the volume from across the room on the couch.
apparently this is supposed to be coming in the 9.0 feature release. So soon™ I'd have to look to be sure, but apparently it's coming.
Volume is weird, i feel like i'd almost like either a "volume target" option, to match volume levels between content, or some sort of fixed audio boost level. Idk.
Can't right click to pause the video in VLC ;c
It's weird to me that anyone would use a PC hooked up to a TV from a couch in 2024, but I'm sure it (otherwise) works for you.
How many PBs you got and how many clients (humans)?
How much traffic across your network in terms of a daily average?
Do you have a local recommendation system running? For example I found a last.fm clone, self-hosted hut I haven't found much for video
Uh it’s just me and whoever is on my local network. I don’t port anything or have any users outside my home. When I go on trips I just download movies and shows from my network to my devices
Five men convicted by the court of the high seas for being absolute chads
The only thing I'm pisseed about is the fact that I was unaware of its existence. Fuck the system
You might be overestimating how much content that was. Streaming services try to maintain an illusion of neverending content but last I saw except for prime, the amount of content they offer has been trending down.
Those numbers are fairly accessible for an average person with 3 or 4 large hard drives.
You can always start creating your own personal media server, using apps such as Plex or Jellyfin, and qBittorrent, SABnzbd, etc.
I’ve been trying to do just that and it’s slow going with qB, if one was looking to avoid dens of sins where you might find a usenet key, where should I stay away from?
Same, what a shame
It probably also had better user experience than all of them
That's the thing about all the pirate apps (apps like Weyd, Syncler, the now-defunct TVZion, etc). They're made by people that actually care, not by companies that are only in it for the money. The user experience is usually a lot better. One of those apps plus a Real Debrid subscription and you're set.
They're here doing everyone a service. Why are there resources to prosecute this but not like elon musk's insider trading?
Because our society is profoundly corrupt
You gotta be stupid as shit to run something like this from the US and keep a financial tail of credit card payments to you.
You also gotta be stupid as shit to actually pay 10 bux for this.
It ran functionally uncontested for ten years. And it would hardly have been the first underground streaming service to pivot legit and cash out.
Napster was sold for $85M back in 2002. Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch in 2011. Hell, AWS has it's share of pirate hosted files.
Wait, is that actually Twitch's history - Justin.tv?
Yeah but megaupload was legit but was still shutdown despite being massive
It's sad that these people got taken down. Maybe the next people to do it will do it from a country that does not have extradition with the United States, so they would be safe.
Edit: As for payment providers attempting to take such a service down, Monero would be the answer to this.
Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,
The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution!
Yeah that competition really did demonstrate what an awful service all those media monopolies provided.
To be fair, the service they provide isn't hosting the videos, it's making them, which I assume costs a bit more
As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.
That's how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It's how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.
The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can't stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.
That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we've yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy -- what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains -- offers more than a few.
To be fair, the service they provide isn't hosting the videos, it's making them, which I assume costs a bit more
caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,_
Maybe? People willing to copy and distribute this content will always be around and you will never catch them all. People willing to pay a discount or seek not and find said content will always be around. And there will be those who will watch a show or a movie because it is freely available, who would never pay a dime for it.
They will never end piracy and I'd argue it might actually be bad for business if they did.
Get your communism here! Only $9.99 a month, or just $99.99 for a year!
cringe
If they had more content on offer than the big legal streaming services combined, should that not tell us something about the quality of legal offers?
What's there to learn that isn't already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That's America in a nutshell.
It's not even copyright laws, it's everyone insisting on exclusive contracts. There's no reason a piece of content couldn't be on Netflix and Disney+ at the same time. It would be a lot better for consumers if streamers could compete on price and service instead of which content they managed to create/licence.
Capitalism wherever it is found. Not just the USA.
Farewell heroes. I may not have heard of you before, but I shall mourn your departure nevertheless.
Yeah. I bet he wasn't looking for a Boeing maintenance video.
It harmed no one and nothing.
TV and Film are just angry that competition did it for a reasonable price and provided a superior service for it.
I have 0 sympathy for the studios/distributors but they also did not pay the licensing fees.
then i guess the studios should stop enshitifying streaming and make a service thats affordable and worth using, huh?
This is despicable. What specific service was this? So I know how to avoid it if it should resurface.
Not only does it say that in the first paragraph, it says it here
Five men were convicted for their part in operating Jetflicks, one of the largest illegal streaming services in the U.S., officials said.
“Sophisticated scripts to scour pirate sites”.
I think we’ve just found a new tagline for radarr and sonarr.
The group used "sophisticated computer scripts" and software to scour piracy services... for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers.
So they used some variant of Sick Beard?
nah probably the arr stack
Sonarr: (Automatic TV series downloads)
Radarr: (Automatic movie downloads)
Tdarr: (Automatic transcoding of media, can help save you a lot of disk space)
Bazarr: (Companion app to Radarr and Sonarr, manages subtitles)
Prowlarr: (A replacement for Jackett from the Arr team)
Lidarr: Music
Readarr: Books
Mylar3: Comic books
Plex-Meta-Manager: (Automatic collections and metadata)
Overseerr: Request tracking and website front-end
Ombi: Let users request both movies/tv shows from a simple web interface.
Dopplarr: Discord bot to make movie/tv/anime requests
Pulsarr: Browser extension for adding movies to Radarr or Series' to Sonarr while browsing IMDB or TVDB.
Tdarr: (Automatic transcoding of media, can help save you a lot of disk space)
That's a new one to me, I'll have to check that out. Thanks!
Been doing conversions via Emby, but it's not a very powerful tool for that.
not all heroes wear capes. thx homie
If you're using sickbeard, switch to medusa. The originally developer of sickbeard is a nut case. He took the project back from the team that was doing development so they forked it and renamed Medusa.
Why didn't you nerds tell me about this, I'm over here hoofing it with this got damn 2tb ssd
only 2tb? that's the size of my cache drives
Realdebrid + stremio just google those you'll be happy friend
It is really good.
Depending on your TV, you can probably stream video directly to it from your computer.
If there is no need,such places would not exist
If there was no DEMAND it wouldn't exist. It exists illegally specifically because it can't be done legally at the price point. That doesn't mean anyone needs it, all the content is presumably available elsewhere. It just costs money and people don't want to pay money.
I don't want to pay money either, I'm just not high minded about it.
Want is not the issue. You can want anything and everything but unless you are able to pay, the need arises for access to the material for a price you can pay that the "legal" owners either dont comprehend or refuse to in the name of greed.
Digital media is culture. And culture should not be reserved for rich people, in my opinion.
If five people can maintain a service bigger than all those combined, then the big streamers need to buck their fucking ideas up.
They had a big library, but not the user base. They were definitely not maintaining anywhere near the infrastructure and bandwidth of major streaming platforms. Netflix claims 260 million users. It's not hard to get a giant catalog when you dont have to pay for it.
Yeah Netflix has to pay for edge connections in major ISPs, and host cash is in places.
The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services (including the Pirate Bay and Torrentz) for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers, according to federal prosecutors.
They probably used Sonarr and Radarr and called it a day (or similar off-the-shelf tools available on GitHub). It's not very sophisticated at all. That combined with Jellyfin and a VPN (or Usenet or a country that doesn't care about piracy) and you have your own up and running. You could also just use free sites with an ad blocker instead of paying $10/mo like the service this article is about charged.
Unrelated to all of this: https://rentry.co/megathread
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
For the elderly folk who write and enforce the laws that caused this to come to pass, sufficiently advanced technology just means more complex than notepad
Yeah, I've got one of those too. Plex is great.
ITT: Have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Jellyfin?
I'm trying to switch to Jellyfin I really am. With Plex I could just throw a file bot at my files normalize the names and it was fine. I can't mark things watched or unwatched from the Roku client. I've now tried three separate times to get the Doctor who specials to show up with names. Plex is by no means perfect but it's so much easier to keep Plex goomed
You know, I've heard this gospel before, I might still have the pamphlet...
Honestly, I haven't really looked into jellyfin yet. I hear it's superior in some way... But I already have Plex all set up and I have 4 friends with servers and we all share content. So it would take a lot for me to switch.
Lasted a week and went back to Plex.
Plex is a privacy nightmare that's slowly trying to faze out you having a server all together in favor of feeding you commercialized content from other providers; and many people find Jellyfin is far too unpolished/disorganized for a lot of debatable reasons I won't go into.
I've been quite happy with the middle ground: Emby. It's not FOSS, but is well polished with consistent development, great feature parity across platforms, excellent clients for pretty much every device I'd want to use, and a helpful community ready to assist with any problems you come across. They also have a heavy focus on privacy; with no third party partners collecting your info like Plex, and no telemetry sent from servers/clients.
The lifetime premier license I bought 7 years ago was well worth it.
Jellyfin is a bitch to get working outside my network. I don't get how Plex made it so easy
Couldn't get on with Jellyfin...emby however has been fantastic!
I always wonder why some people are so dedicated to Jellyfin. Even if JF had full feature and experience parity, it would still not have secure remote access the way Plex does. There is no need to port forward or NAT Plex for external access if you use app.plex.tv to access. With the threat landscape the way it is today, that is worth a lot.
I want to switch very badly but their device apps are lacking.
Streaming services become required by law like insurance
Wait, why am I required to pay for a streaming service?
Because it has all of the entertainment electrolytes a human needs
We already have the private copying levy in Germany and some other countries, where you have to pay a fee for several products (printers, scanners, storage media like HDDs, SSDs, SD cards and thumb drives...) due to the potential that you could do (legal!) private copies of copyrighted media on them. The copyright collectives can set the amount of the fees freely (and it's ridiculously high).
This comes shockingly close to the concept already.
I member the good old days when we were buying our blank CD/DVD in Germany to avoid paying those taxes.
I'm not sure about other countries, but here in Czech we actually have a mandatory subscription, that's absolutely bullshit.
So far, the law is that if you own any TV or radio, you have to pay monthly fee for public service broadcasters (national Czech TV). It's bullshit, the channels are full of ads anyway, and the shows they run and create is insultingly bad. Sure, it is important to have public service broadcasters that are not dependent on the state (because state-owned TV is reeaallly bad idea), but FFS can they just reduce costs and stick to news, instead of doing another stupid series, and stop forcing us to pay for something I don't care about or use?
You could just not pay the fee, if you state you don't have a TV capable of receiving it (which I don't). But now, they are changing the law that everyone who has any kind of internet-capable device has to pay the monthly fee, while also rising prices to something like 6 EUR per month. Fuck that and fuck them.
Reminds me of the BBC licence fee in the UK.
5 times the content. Where do I sign up?
Check out Softwarr "for free" or Real Debrid and Stremio/Kodi if you wanna spend some well spend money, the latter guarantee more content than Netflix etc, the former everything that could ever exists on the internet.
It's called notjetflix.org.gov
They solved a problem people had after the fragmentation :)
My guess is because they did all the pirating for you so you didn't have to worry about dealing with the technical hurdles of doing so.
If a service like this came around that allowed me to pay with Monero and did not require any personally identifiable information, I would totally fucking use it.
piracy is a service issue.
also, fuck IP owners, pigs got too fat while cutting on service.
because piracy is a service problem
Because all the legal services are incredibly anti-consumer and are offering less services, with (more) ads, for more money every year.
The entire system exists for the benefit of business, not customers.
Just look at what happens with accused theft in a store. You get accused of theft? Cops are there in no time, take you to the ground, throw you in the back of the cop car. only after they've gotten the humiliation and brutalization in might someone come and take your proof that you didnt steal anything.
You accuse the store of stealing from you? Due to not following their own policy on returns, or overcharging and an item and not fixing it Police won't even show. just tell you its a civil matter and to suck it up.
My guess is It's probably cheaper and has much greater variety. You can watch anything from any streaming service through one single interface at the price of one service.
Because the legal options are garbage.
The pirates provide a better service with more content for cheaper than the legal options; and pirating yourself takes effort as well as cost (hardware, trackers, usenet, etc).
Some people are happy to just pay for decent service; others like to learn about the process, then setup and run their own servers.
To each their own.
because IPTV is like $6 per month and has every single channel known to earth.... it's a tiny fraction compared to any cable especially if you watch sports (the only real reason to pay for cable anyway)
I dont subscribe to any streaming service (except the occasional free prime trial, to be full disclosure), not even the one in the news story... but I can still answer your question..
Because I want to pay a single service to watch everything. Like Netflix used to be. Watch everything I want, for one monthly price that was reasonable.
But its not like that anymore. Every company looked at how well Netflix used to do, went "Fuck them! I want all that money for my self!" and took their content off Netflix, and made their own streaming services.
Now if you want to consume any media, You have to subscribe to 50 different subscription services, for hundreds of dollars a month, Which is just Cable 2.0 but with worse service and options.
The majority of piracy is not free.
I've paid for usenet, seed boxes, private servers, and more recently torrent cache services.
You pay because it's much cheaper than commercial services and a better experience with more content.
You pay like $5/Mo for the content of all streaming services and more instead of the $500/Mo it would cost to subscribe to each of them individually. Plus you're not taking any legal risk as a customer.
Pirating implies some knowledge and effort some people may not have or want to get into
Paid Legal services are so enshitified some people may think they are getting ripped up
Paid illegal services are often HUGE bang for buck value (no enshitification, no limits, no nonsense and often better customer service)
In addition to other things people responded with, piracy services tend to not collect users data or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.
or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.
Man this one chaff's me the most. I way a paying Netflix customer like 8 years ago. I had IPv6 setup as a 6rd tunnel through HE (Hurricane Electric) because my ISP didn't offer IPv6. Netflix treated that as a VPN and blocked me as a paying customer... Even though I lived/payed from the same fucking locale. It's not like I was using a VPN to bypass a Geoblock. I was just making IPv6 available to myself. I cancelled because of that. You do not get to tell me how I access the internet at large, especially when I'm not even being shady about it.
Access to Usenet providers is not free
its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.
however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim. maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like "better get money from ALL markets!" or such.
Did someone leak their Jellyfin credentials?
Teoretically speaking, asking for a friend who's doing research, how would you access such a service? :)
There’s plenty of services like this that people use a firestick to connect too.
My friend uses one but I forget the name of it. You can find them online but people usually buy a package of say 20 connections and then sell them to friends and family. I’ll try and remember what to search for and come back.
Edit: IPTV is a good search term.
"When a hero comes along . . ."
The poor copyright holders. Won’t someone think of the corporations for once?
I wonder how that compares to my own collection...
I haven't found a source for the size of Netflix/Amazon/Hulus libraries; but I haven't looked all that hard either.
Just slap them on the wrist and send them on their way.
No, slaps on the wrist are only for rich people. If you inconvenience rich people, that's unforgivable.
183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative "non-approved" sources.
One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.
Not trying to sound elitist, but...all the content combined still isn't worth $10. Mind you the last TV show I liked was Better Call Saul, the last Hollywood movie I liked was...let me think...The Irishman, I guess?
Since 2000 the amount of TV shows I truly enjoyed watching and would watch again was maybe 8. The amount of movies maybe 20. So less than one per year.
And because I don't have to watch stuff when it comes out, but am totally fine with watching things years later, when it's cheap or free, I'd wager I spend less than $10 per year on TV and movie entertainment.
I think the shows have been better than the movies
Succession was really good, for example
All my favorite movies this year have been on youtube.
Most of them by Joel Haver.
Sire!
Tony Ladruzo?
Huzzah!
You don’t sound elitist, just a little boring.
I'll take that as a compliment. It's the 2nd time someone told me this, the first time was when a girl found out I didn't have any tattoos.
Hey, look! They had a cookbook on tyranny...
All the comments in here are so damn tedious. Copyright is a mess, but holy shit, people tie themselves in knots to make excuses for pirates being careless and stupid
I mean, operate a massive illegal streaming service that has more content than everyone combined, but don't be so tacky as to charge for it.
Proving Netflix could be replaced by five hard working people.
Things are easier if you can steal stuff. And operate on a small scale.
They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.
Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially
Or fund new content
Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.
The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.
If we get rid of the licensing we get rid of the lawyers.
Precisely. So much added expense for zero, or rather negative, added value.
The only reason all companies prices go up these days is for CEO pay packages
I think it’s more for major shareholders (which includes CEOs, of course)
Like Boeing's CEO making 300 million.... imagine 300 people who worked their ass off could make million. Or 1500 hard workers could be making 200k. But nah, let's just drag these huge bags of money into this one asshole's account. Oh there were a couple of crashes right? 👍 Our thoughts and prayers 🙏. But not our money wagons.
Did they make the shows too?
Does Netflix make shows? Or does it slam its name onto filmmakers it pays to make content? If so, one of those things simply requires throwing cash at people, which I think is a skill that most people can learn.
Does Netflix? Or do they pay production companies for content?