this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

Wow, that must have had like 12 shows.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago

It's not that hard to compete with the ever shrinking Netflix library

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I miss the old Netflix, where discs would come to my house.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Don't worry, there are still some services out there that do this!

3D Blu-ray Rental

DVDInbox

And Gamefly allows you to rent movies, too!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've read that some people are going back to simpler tech stacks, and it feels like they're just leaving money on the table if that demographic continues to grow.

Who knows, though? Maybe somebody new will fill in that niche.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I wasn't raised with cable so TV isn't my thing, but I was fortunate enough to live by a $1 theatre and watch all kind of movies in a theatre, I'm just gonna go back to that. Once I find a dollar theatre.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Wow, it's really hard to imagine the deep societal harm done by these five people. And you do have to imagine it because it doesn't exist.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Entertainment to uplift the spirit? For free? Think of the children!

(Apparently not free at all, $10/month.)

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Five Guys have better service that is free than largest paid service providers shrug-outta-hecks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Five Guys have better service that is free

It wasn't free — they were charging money for it:

Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Cheaper, not free.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Mentally translating this as: Competition from the free market unfairly prosecuted by a tyrannical state that enforces the monopoly of “intellectual property” of corporations

This is insane. This does not warrant a 48 year sentence; some actual rapists and murderers get off for less time. The “justice” system is a joke and doesn’t prosecute criminals. It prosecutes those that threaten the system.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

To be fair, Netflix and the others all had to pay licensing fees and whatnot. I think governments should simply ban exclusivity deals so that competition can exist.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sentencing hasn't happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.

Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it's just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Thanks for the clarification. Hope they get the greasiest lawyer they can find outta this.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Free my boys they did nothing wrong. Also, I thought the US doesn't go after you with copyright unless you profit from it.

Edit: my bad, they were charging for this. Yeah..

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 Justice Department said Thursday.

Lmao must of us here do the same thing. It's not hard. I don't think I've written a script for this but it can't be too difficult.

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The average human considers the Pythagorean theorem "sophistication". Let's not take our education for granted.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Alt: a single pane comic in which a person says to another person: "silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochemists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars.

The other person says: "and quartz, of course"

The first person replies: "of course."

The caption to the comic reads "even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field"

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Give me like $7,500 and I provide enough harddisks for 183,200 episodes. I'm not sure what to calculate for traffic, though.

And I mean it's a bit unfortunate that you have to commit money laundering and/or tax fraud alongside this "business model". It's just not that easy to say: Hey, I would like to pay taxes on this pile of money and I don't want to say where I got it from, it's definitely mine, though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Were they using cryptocurrency? Maybe that's how they thought they could get away with it. The article doesn't say

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The article doesn't talk much at all about all the interesting technical details.

The press release talks about trouble with payment providers... So I suppose they accepted credit card payment.

Maybe the court documents are publicly available if anyone is willing to dig them up in order to find out... I don't think I'm that interested. If it's a good story, maybe someone will do a documentery or podcast episode at some point. Would probably do for a "true crime" show.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

At one point, Jetflicks claimed to host more than 183,200 TV episodes.

Look what they took from you!

[–] [email protected] 61 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's not exactly difficult to have more content than those services when they keep fucking around with exclusivity bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

Yeah... when you pull up stats for Netflix library, you learn some things... Like how little content they actually had. Never cracked 7000 movies... And while that may seem like a lot to a lot of people out there. Those of us that remember blockbuster stores, you ignore like 90% of them cause they're dumb or silly movies that you'd never watch anyway (or stuff you've already watched). Then you can put actual numbers to it... If each of these are full bluray rips (which they're not as far as Netflix goes) they only take up 175TB... It's not a lot of movies at all.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-netflix-movie-and-tv-show-catalog-changed-over-time-2020-2

It's pretty easy to see how an individual could collect more content than netflix easily. Now add money to the equation... I think it would be possible to collect double or triple netflix easily.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

Right? This dude was probably just hosting all of the content that the platforms removed over the years lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Those people won't just stop we should stop them

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Indeed. The federal agents have stepped way out of line with this one

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

My takeaway: jetflix developed a model that worked. Just need to replicate that many times.

Would probably work well for sharing with family /friends.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Would probably work well for sharing with family /friends.

So, Jellyfin ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Getting it from my server securely to their TV is the issue.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

I misread the title as "Fire men convicted of massive, illegal streaming service" and was wondering if they were broadcasting fires

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