The men made millions of dollars streaming stolen copyrighted content to tens of thousands of paid subscribers, the Justice Department said.
Five men were convicted by a federal jury in Las Vegas this week for running a large illegal streaming service called Jetflicks, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi, and Peter Huber began operating the subscription service as early as 2007, the Justice Department said in a release Thursday. They would find illegal copies of content online that they then downloaded to Jetflicks servers, the release said.
The men made millions of dollars streaming this content to tens of thousands of paid subscribers, according to the Justice Department.
Even that’s fairly debatable. The usual case of such “massive libraries of content” is that most of it isn’t even available to pay for; not provided by the content owner on any platform whatsoever (aka “vaulted”) or the content owner does not make it available in the country of the person that wants to view it.
If there was more content on it than on multiple streaming platforms combined, wanna bet not all of it wasn’t available?
Anyway, it doesn’t matter, it would still mean a distributor didn’t get paid for the content they’re contracted to distribute if there’s interest for it.
I understand the logic that “X isn’t available otherwise so it’s ok” but that’s a moral view, not a legal one.
Less about right/wrong, more that there are no actual damages. If you aren’t making something available for pay for and someone pirates it, you’re making the exact same amount as you would if they hadn’t: nothing.
It’s people bitching about hypothetical money.
Again, you’re assuming they had more content than multiple legit distributors and none of it was available elsewhere without proving it was the case.