Justice Department convicts five men for running a huge illegal streaming service

5 males are going to spend time in jail for working a streaming service with extra content material than the heavy-hitters.

Effectively, technically, they are going to jail as a result of all of that content material was stolen within the first place. The U.S. Division of Justice introduced on Thursday that 5 males had been convicted on numerous prices associated to Jetflicks, an illegitimate streaming service that had been working since at the least 2007. Jared Jaurequi, Peter Huber, Douglas Courson, Kristopher Dallman, and Felipe Garcia had all been concerned with Jetflicks in some capability, and all will serve time, although how a lot is unsure at this juncture.

The way in which Jetflicks labored was that some sort of refined program would dig by piracy web sites for stolen episodes of TV, which might then be added to the service. In all, greater than 183,000 TV episodes graced Jetflicks, which the DOJ claims is “bigger than the mixed catalogues of Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime.”

Apart from the truth that the TV episodes have been pirated, Jetflicks additionally generated “thousands and thousands” in income on account of a $9.99/mo subscription charge that customers paid to entry the content material. The precise funniest a part of this story is the truth that, per Selection, Jetflicks was capable of dodge copyright holders for therefore lengthy due partly to telling cost suppliers that it was really an airline leisure firm.

As a substitute of pondering the morality of copyright regulation and the carceral state, let’s simply sit with that for a minute.