
Two Las Vegas Men Plead Guilty in U.S. Criminal Streaming Piracy Case - tdurden
https://torrentfreak.com/two-las-vegas-men-plead-guilty-in-u-s-criminal-streaming-piracy-case-191214/
======
PeterStuer
Services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video would be a lot more successful
if only their catalogs in regions outside of the US would be comparable to
their home turf.

If US clients would have the tiny tiny catalogs they offer e.g. in most of
Europe, you would also be scratching your head how this could ever justify the
subscription cost.

~~~
mywittyname
Could you imagine how great these services would be if copyrighted works fell
into the public domain after 28 years instead of the nearly 100 years they are
now?

~~~
jessaustin
Sure, but in that case most current films would never have been made... or at
least I got that distinct impression from MPAA.

~~~
behringer
Which films exactly took 28 years to turn a profit?

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umvi
That's not the point.

Valve turned a huge profit on Portal 2. Yet they refuse to make Portal 3. Why?
Because compared to Steam, Portal 2 generates a tiny ROI by comparison.

Option A: invest $1 in Steam and get $10 back

Option B: invest $1 in Portal 3 and get $2 back

which do you do?

Same goes for movie industry. A movie promises returns for decades as it is
milked and re-released in various formats. If the movie can only make money
for 20-ish years, ROI goes down significantly. Read: "The Disney Vault" [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault)

~~~
behringer
May I offer an alternative reason why Valve did not make Portal 3? It's
because when you rehash the same game, people get sick of it. Sometimes a
product needs to stand on it's own. Why harm the Portal franchise by being to
quick to release, release, release?

Seems like hollywood is already on board with this. What do they need
Ghostbusters to have a 100 year copyright on when they could just release a
new Ghostbusters every 30-40 years like they're pretty much already doing.

~~~
umvi
If you don't plan on making Portal 3, don't tease Portal 3 with easter eggs
like the Borealis.

~~~
behringer
Like I made mention before, just because they don't want to release it now
doesn't mean they won't want to do another one in 20-30 years after
technologies and ideas have had enough time to mature to put a new twist on
things.

~~~
umvi
Half their fanbase will be dead in 30 years

~~~
behringer
So you're saying we'll get a reboot ;)

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mapleoin
So two programmers ran a streaming website bigger than Netflix from their
garage?

~~~
Consultant32452
Something is fishy about this. Netflix's infrastructure is massive, and their
bandwidth usage is a big chunk of the entire internet. How could this possibly
go unnoticed for any amount of time?

~~~
bestnameever
I think it is in an error in the reporting. The press release from the FBI
only mentions content, not subscribers.

I actually remember JetFlix and wondering how they had so much content. They
were acting like a real company, IIRC.

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firefoxd
This might be a naive question but, why is the FBI the office in charge of
enforcing copyright? Especially when it comes to entertainment. Why do we get
an FBI warning on a cartoon's dvd?

~~~
kd5bjo
Copyright and patent authority is explicitly granted to the Federal government
by Art. I, Sec. 8 of the US constitution:

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and
useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

As such, state courts and police forces have no jurisdiction over copyright
issues; they must be handled by the federal courts and police force (the FBI).

(Text from [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-
transcri...](https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript) )

~~~
jalla
Why didn't FBI get involved against Napster?

~~~
x86_64Ubuntu
I assume it's because Napster was the first to really take file-sharing global
and at such an accessible scale. And maybe the laws and enforcement procedures
hadn't really caught up. But keep in mind, that Napsters defense was that they
were just acting as an intermediary, they never actively distributed and held
the content unlike our heroes at JetFlix.

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paule89
Its like in the beginning of torrenting. Nobody willing to offer a service for
everyone, for a fair price. Everybody gatekeeping selling only their stuff.
And if you want everything pay this atrocious sum of money.

I tell you this will happen more often and people are willing to pay. But not
pay for everything. Good thing they had going. Well it was still illegal, but
hey it will happen again i tell you.

~~~
zaarn
Streaming is a service question. Netflix/D+/AMZN offers you a limited
catalogue for 10$ or so a month. You select a movie from their website and it
starts playing on your phone or computer.

Pirates offer you _everything_ for _free_. You select a movie from their
website and it starts playing on your phone or computer.

Why would any customer pick the more expensive product? Netflix and Friends
need to offer a better service and experience at a low price. Notably that
will have to include one subscription for everything.

Steam from Valve has been extremely successfull because they offer a very good
service for fairly good prices. Now that EGS is trying to bleed customers,
video game piracy is going up again because nobody likes exclusives except
those that get money for them.

~~~
dobleboble
Why would any customer pick the more expensive product? 1) they don't want to
be criminals 2) they want to support the art that they enjoy so that more of
it can be made

~~~
zaarn
Since piracy isn't quite the most uncommon criminal activity, I supposed
people only care weak about those two and I would bet most people care more
about 2 than 1 because people don't see it as criminal activity.

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latchkey
Why would you do this from within the US? The mind boggles.

~~~
mirimir
Well, TFA says:

> "Specifically, Polo used sophisticated computer programming to [get pirated
> stuff] and then make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada,"
> officials said.

So the fact that they were in the US is irrelevant.

But I'm sure that they got caught because they didn't know how to stay
anonymous. Or were too lazy. Or got too greedy.

I mean, there are far better hosting alternatives than Canada. I guess that
they wanted low latency for US customers. But still, they should have isolated
themselves from the damn servers.

I'm guessing that it was their payment setup that got them pwned.

~~~
latchkey
I disagree on irrelevant. The fact that they stayed in the US definitely makes
it harder to be anonymous (friends, relatives, language, police presence,
etc)... it also makes it easier to be caught.

~~~
mirimir
There's no way to know what happened in their case.

But I suspect that it was a "loose lips" thing. Exacerbated, probably, by
developing the project gradually. Being sloppy at first, because it was just
playing around. Also bragging, and living large. That's a common set of fails.
It played a major role in DPR's takedown. Also Sabu, who had been indiscreet
on IRC, years before. And Artem Vaulin of KickassTorrents, who registered a
key domain in his own name.

There's also the difficulty of accepting and accessing money anonymously. The
Sheep Marketplace founder pwned himself when he cashed out. It's very hard to
route around KYC law. The safest bet is collecting payments as Bitcon, Monero,
etc And leaving everything except operating expenses in cryptocurrency, until
it's time to expatriate to a safe jurisdiction, and cash out some of that good
wealth.

~~~
x86_64Ubuntu
It also seems like when you start working with money, you cross into a whole
different level of having a bad day by the Feds. If they had run something
that had been ad based, they might have been able to stay off the FBI's
shitlist. But when you have subscribers, and bank accounts and money transfers
you are raising the governments ire.

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haunter
It's cable TV all over again. The current streaming scene is not any better at
all.

~~~
Pigo
My mind is blown that these sites were actually getting paid subscribers. I
thought the beauty of piracy is the whole "not paying for it" thing.

I refuse to pay for more than one subscription service, I'm not going to end
up paying more than I did for cable tv. Hulu still wins for me because it has
the live/local tv, and I'm not giving Disney anymore money.

~~~
mywittyname
The beauty of piracy is that you can watch/listen to what you want to, how you
want to, when you want to. People are more than happy to pay reasonable prices
for content, so long as they can use it how they want; see: Spotify.

I'd pay $50/mo for a streaming service that had a significant number of movies
and television shows that I want to watch. As it stands, I still need to
pirate movies because they are not available on stream services, or they are
only available for "purchase" at like $14-17 when I know for a fact that the
same movies are sitting in the Walmart DVD bin for $5.

~~~
Pigo
You're correct of course, because I have consistently paid for services when
they have stuff I wanted at reasonable prices. It's worth it just to relieve
myself from the hassle of downloading and filling up my hard drive with stuff.
The entire King of the Hill can fill up a HD.

It's just been my experience that these 'popcorn time' services are janky and
law enforcement magnets, it's surprising anyone would pay for it. But I
suppose I live somewhere that doesn't have as many roadblocks as some places.

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kleer001
No doubt they weren't cryptography and security nerds. I wonder how a team
with great operational security would have done.

I bet that it's possible with a dedicated team with good clean opsec and
intelligently placed servers it'd be possible to fly under the radar for
decades.

~~~
magduf
I'm surprised some foreign power hasn't done this just for the sole reason of
messing with the US movie industry, which is one of America's more significant
export industries, and thereby harming the American economy.

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noname120
Article should be replaced with this one[1], which is much more informative.

Most notably, the headline of the linked article is ridiculously incorrect.
The statement of facts states that they only processed 0.018M credit/debit
card transactions over roughly the 2014-2016 period[2]. I would be extremely
surprised if it reached Netflix's _152M of worldwide paid memberships_ for
streaming in 2019[3][4].

[1] [https://torrentfreak.com/two-las-vegas-men-plead-guilty-
in-u...](https://torrentfreak.com/two-las-vegas-men-plead-guilty-in-u-s-
criminal-streaming-piracy-case-191214/)

[2]
[https://torrentfreak.com/images/polosof.pdf#page=1&search=%2...](https://torrentfreak.com/images/polosof.pdf#page=1&search=%2218,551%20successful%20credit%22%22)

[3]
[https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_financials/quarter...](https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_financials/quarterly_reports/2019/q2/Q2-19-Shareholder-
Letter-FINAL.pdf#page=1)

[4]
[https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_financials/quarter...](https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_financials/quarterly_reports/2019/q2/Q2-19-Shareholder-
Letter-FINAL.pdf#page=11&search=%22memberships%22)

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55555
There is no way they had more paying subscribers than Netflix. Netflix has 160
million paying customers. These two guys had "more" and made only 1 million
dollars total. What?

Probably their total pageviews vs Netflix's total paying customers or
something dumb like that.

~~~
wp381640
The DOJ presser said the site was "larger" than Netflix, Hulu and Amazon
combined in terms of available content - some media reports have misreported
it as larger by subscriber count

~~~
jmcs
That goes without saying, content providers are shooting themselves in the
foot with an atomic shotgun with the current fragmentation and lots of content
is not legally available anywhere.

~~~
dddddaviddddd
A tragedy of the commons among the content providers -- exclusive content is
an edge that they can't resist individually, but damages them collectively.

~~~
magduf
I don't think "tragedy of the commons" is the appropriate term for what's
going on here. These movies aren't a "commons", they're all privately owned by
a bunch of different private entities. They used to license them to Netflix to
be streamed, but now they've pulled back from that a lot so they can operate
their own streaming services.

"Tragedy of the commons" is when a bunch of private interests use a publicly-
owned resource in a greedy way and end up ruining it for everyone. I don't
think this quite applies here, but I don't know of any other term to call it
because I can't think of any non-internet analogies.

