Five men are going to spend time in prison for running a streaming service with more content than the heavy-hitters.
Well, technically, they’re going to prison because all of that content was stolen in the first place. The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday that five men had been convicted on various charges related to Jetflicks, an illegitimate streaming service that had been running since at least 2007. Jared Jaurequi, Peter Huber, Douglas Courson, Kristopher Dallman, and Felipe Garcia had all been involved with Jetflicks in some capacity, and all will serve time, though how much is uncertain at this juncture.
The way Jetflicks worked was that some kind of sophisticated program would dig through piracy websites for stolen episodes of TV, which would then be added to the service. In all, more than 183,000 TV episodes graced Jetflicks, which the DOJ claims is « larger than the combined catalogues of Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime. »
Aside from the fact that the TV episodes were pirated, Jetflicks also generated « millions » in revenue due to a $9.99/mo subscription fee that users paid to access the content. The actual funniest part of this story is the fact that, per Variety, Jetflicks was able to dodge copyright holders for so long due in part to telling payment providers that it was actually an airline entertainment company.
Instead of pondering the morality of copyright law and the carceral state, let’s just sit with that for a minute.
