Five men were convicted for their part in operating Jetflicks, one of the largest illegal streaming services in the U.S., officials said.
    • anlumo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      124·
      5 个月前

      They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.

      • FreudianCafe@lemmy.mlEnglish
        97·
        5 个月前

        Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially

      • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.mlEnglish
        10·
        5 个月前

        Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.

        The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          5 个月前

          Prices should go down with scale not up though.

          There’s initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.

          The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.

          So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don’t pay those licenses.

          • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.mlEnglish
            3·
            5 个月前

            The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You’re also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.

            The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.

          • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
            21·
            5 个月前

            Certain types of content. But YouTube’s own existence started because people made content without licensing rights.

            • evidences@lemmy.worldEnglish
              7·
              5 个月前

              Technically YouTube exists because three horny nerds wanted a dating site with video integration. It only turned into a video sharing site when they realized they couldn’t find the clip of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction and they decided they wanted to build that platform instead.

          • Cosmicomical@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            5 个月前

            Not really. I can undersgand licensing but at this point it’s become a distopian practice completely separated from the basic need to monetize the content an make a profit. That’s why those companies become such gargantuans monsters.

          • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
            1·
            5 个月前

            Nope. People will still make content. It’ll be on far less of a budget, but that didn’t stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.

            And then there’s government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.

            I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).

            We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don’t have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we’ll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.

            • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              5 个月前

              If you take away the ability to own and control your intellectual property, then you won’t be empowered.

              Licensing art allows creators to earn a living off of their hard work.

              • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
                2·
                5 个月前

                Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they’ve paid you enough (which is much less than they’re getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don’t like it, they’ll make sure it tanks or at least doesn’t get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn’t have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.

                Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they’ve already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.

                No, we’d get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.

                Intellectual property is a construct, and it’s corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.

                I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.

                But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it’s confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we’ll get culture out of it.

                You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.

                • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  5 个月前

                  Sorry, I’m not going to read all that, but it seems like you’re upset about the shitty deals made by record labels and other large corporations, not intellectual property rights.

      • werefreeatlast@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        5 个月前

        Like Boeing’s CEO making 300 million… imagine 300 people who worked their ass off could make million. Or 1500 hard workers could be making 200k. But nah, let’s just drag these huge bags of money into this one asshole’s account. Oh there were a couple of crashes right? 👍 Our thoughts and prayers 🙏. But not our money wagons.

      • tetris11@lemmy.mlEnglish
        19·
        5 个月前

        Does Netflix make shows? Or does it slam its name onto filmmakers it pays to make content? If so, one of those things simply requires throwing cash at people, which I think is a skill that most people can learn.

          • tetris11@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            5 个月前

            They had to operate under the radar to avoid the law, so you know the answer to your question

            • iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              5 个月前

              So Netflix actually pays for shows to get made, so when everyone pays for Netflix, it lets everyone enjoy them. Pirate sites only extract value from the hard work of the producers, without paying them.

              • tetris11@lemmy.mlEnglish
                1·
                5 个月前

                producers don’t make the content, they speak to the right people in their exclusive circles to finance it, put their name on it, and then pay the directors and actors a tiny fraction of what it earned

                • iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  5 个月前

                  Okay, now tell me how pirate sites contribute to creation of said content

  • kakes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    203·
    5 个月前

    Love how they make this sound like some incredible feat. When you aren’t bound to license agreements, turns out it’s actually very easy to have a “massive” content library. Literally the only hurdle is storage space.

  • Snapz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    150·
    5 个月前

    Nobody gives a shit, you’re not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.

    This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after beating peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.

    You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

    • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zipEnglish
      23·
      5 个月前

      You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

      That’s not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don’t go after Trump. He’s in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.

    • Adalast@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      5 个月前

      When cops only legal responsibility is to enforce the law, and the laws are written to protect corporate interests, of course they will stand outside the school and arrest protesters. SCOTUS has ruled that way so many times that “to serve and protect” is literally gaslighting.

      • AlbinoPython@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23·
        5 个月前

        Nobody gives a shit, you’re not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.

        This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after bearing peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.

        You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

          • Lad@reddthat.comEnglish
            6·
            5 个月前

            Tout le monde s’en fout, vous ne faites pas assez pour punir Trump pour ses crimes évidents, littéralement filmés et enregistrés.

            C’est l’équivalent des flics qui se réjouissent d’avoir abattu des manifestants pacifiques à l’université tout en se pissant dessus et en se gelant pendant que les enfants d’uvalde se faisaient massacrer et torturer psychologiquement.

            Vous vous concentrez sur la non-victoire et ignorez les échecs. Lâches.

  • Grippler@feddit.dkEnglish
    136·
    5 个月前

    “The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services”

    They used the basic tools that most(?) pirates use today like sonarr and radar??

    I don’t mind people pirating…i do mind people pirating and profiting from redistribution.

  • Lad@reddthat.comEnglish
    114·
    5 个月前

    Five men convicted by the court of the high seas for being absolute chads

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      23·
      5 个月前

      That’s the thing about all the pirate apps (apps like Weyd, Syncler, the now-defunct TVZion, etc). They’re made by people that actually care, not by companies that are only in it for the money. The user experience is usually a lot better. One of those apps plus a Real Debrid subscription and you’re set.

        • Setnof@feddit.deEnglish
          9·
          5 个月前

          I’ve heard that you can download stuff from filmfans.org and serienfans.org with jdownloader. Reportedly it’s then possible to host it locally on your own Synology NAS and use Infuse on your Apple TV for a magnificent user experience.

          • dan@upvote.auEnglish
            7·
            5 个月前

            Rumor has it that apps that use Real Debrid are way easier to use since you can just go to a TV show and watch it. Even a non technical person can use apps like Weyd. Real Debrid supposedly caches torrents on their server so you can instantly stream them over an encrypted connection.

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          4·
          5 个月前

          I’ve heard that Google might have information about Real Debrid and apps that support it. I cannot confirm or deny this myself.

        • LeFantome@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          5 个月前

          He is saying that people that get rich selling others people’s stuff without paying for it are not “in it for the money”. What don’t you understand.

        • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          5 个月前

          If they’re servicing that many users their UX should be better, but it’s not. Search should work better, but it doesn’t. They should let me make playlists, but they don’t.

          Yes, scale is hard but it shouldn’t be hard to put a clock in the pause screen showing me what time the show will be done. And that’s just a tiny way Plex is better.

  • Dorkyd68@lemmy.worldEnglish
    112·
    5 个月前

    The only thing I’m pisseed about is the fact that I was unaware of its existence. Fuck the system

    • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      5 个月前

      You might be overestimating how much content that was. Streaming services try to maintain an illusion of neverending content but last I saw except for prime, the amount of content they offer has been trending down.

      Those numbers are fairly accessible for an average person with 3 or 4 large hard drives.

    • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
      5·
      5 个月前

      You can always start creating your own personal media server, using apps such as Plex or Jellyfin, and qBittorrent, SABnzbd, etc.

      • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        5 个月前

        I’ve been trying to do just that and it’s slow going with qB, if one was looking to avoid dens of sins where you might find a usenet key, where should I stay away from?

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.worldEnglish
    105·
    5 个月前

    You gotta be stupid as shit to run something like this from the US and keep a financial tail of credit card payments to you.

    You also gotta be stupid as shit to actually pay 10 bux for this.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      59·
      5 个月前

      It ran functionally uncontested for ten years. And it would hardly have been the first underground streaming service to pivot legit and cash out.

      Napster was sold for $85M back in 2002. Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch in 2011. Hell, AWS has it’s share of pirate hosted files.

  • Fedizen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    104·
    5 个月前

    They’re here doing everyone a service. Why are there resources to prosecute this but not like elon musk’s insider trading?

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
    98·
    5 个月前

    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 ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution!

      • aidan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        5 个月前

        To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more

        • Cosmicomical@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          5 个月前

          To be fairer nobody asked them to produce content. They decided to create it because it’s cheaper that licensing the actual good stuff.

          • aidan@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6·
            5 个月前

            eh some of it is good, I personally wouldn’t want to just watched licensed shows from 50 years ago

            • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
              1·
              5 个月前

              Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.

              Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

              Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.

              • aidan@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                5 个月前

                Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

                I mean, supposed to according to who?

                • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
                  1·
                  5 个月前

                  Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.

                  So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that’s a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.

        • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
          1·
          5 个月前

          The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.

          As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can’t couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.

          It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.

          • aidan@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            5 个月前

            The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.

            If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed(and there are many others who created similar tools for it) so I don’t see it as particularly valuable.

            Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.

            There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results. Memory foam, cordless drills, etc could have been developed much more cheaply than the Apollo program, GPS is extremely valuable, but Apollo wasn’t a necessary precursor to geostationary orbit.

            • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
              1·
              5 个月前

              If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed

              From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius

              The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.

              There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.

              For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.

              • aidan@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                5 个月前

                From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius

                I don’t really understand how this follows from what I said.

                For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.

                Do you have a source for that? (And what that claim actually means), afterall, plenty of “essential” inventions in the modern day(including the base of modern rocketry) came from weapons development- does that make war a good investment? (Of course its not 1-to-1 because war is destructive, but my point is putting a lot of effort and smart people into almost anything will lead to a lot of innovation)

                • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
                  1·
                  5 个月前

                  I don’t really understand how [The bit on Van Gogh – that he was only posthumously appreciated in the art sector] follows from what I said.

                  My following paragraph is about that. Art often happens before the framework made to create it. In fact, when we have set up studio, they’re already doing knock-offs, trying to repeat prior successes.

                  For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14

                  Do you have a source for that?

                  This came up during a TED talk on the benefits of investing in big science. On an unrelated research effort, I found the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which Eisenhower signed during his freak out over Sputnik, and the big grant to Fairchild Superconductor which kicked off the electronics boom in Silicon Valley (~San Jose, California), so the $14 value is certainly plausible.

      • aidan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        5 个月前

        To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
        1·
        5 个月前

        As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.

        That’s how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It’s how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.

        The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can’t stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.

        That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we’ve yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy – what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains – offers more than a few.

    • GroundedGator@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      5 个月前

      caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,_

      Maybe? People willing to copy and distribute this content will always be around and you will never catch them all. People willing to pay a discount or seek not and find said content will always be around. And there will be those who will watch a show or a movie because it is freely available, who would never pay a dime for it.

      They will never end piracy and I’d argue it might actually be bad for business if they did.

  • lemmylommy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    89·
    5 个月前

    If they had more content on offer than the big legal streaming services combined, should that not tell us something about the quality of legal offers?

    • krashmo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      63·
      5 个月前

      What’s there to learn that isn’t already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That’s America in a nutshell.

      • jonne@infosec.pubEnglish
        35·
        5 个月前

        It’s not even copyright laws, it’s everyone insisting on exclusive contracts. There’s no reason a piece of content couldn’t be on Netflix and Disney+ at the same time. It would be a lot better for consumers if streamers could compete on price and service instead of which content they managed to create/licence.

        • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.worldEnglish
          18·
          5 个月前

          Music streaming has proven this for years now, all the major brands have massive collections that make its super easy to pay and listen to just about anything.

          Early Netflix proved this when everything was readily available for an affordable pricre.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          12·
          5 个月前

          Exactly. I like Netflix’s service, but Disney’s content. Why can’t I just pay for a Disney bundle on Netflix? Likewise with Max, Peacock, etc.

          Lawyers are why we can’t have nice things.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    83·
    5 个月前

    It harmed no one and nothing.

    TV and Film are just angry that competition did it for a reasonable price and provided a superior service for it.

    • thirteene@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      5 个月前

      I have 0 sympathy for the studios/distributors but they also did not pay the licensing fees.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        5 个月前

        then i guess the studios should stop enshitifying streaming and make a service thats affordable and worth using, huh?

  • el_abuelo@lemmy.mlEnglish
    73·
    5 个月前

    This is despicable. What specific service was this? So I know how to avoid it if it should resurface.

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.caEnglish
      44·
      5 个月前

      Not only does it say that in the first paragraph, it says it here

      Five men were convicted for their part in operating Jetflicks, one of the largest illegal streaming services in the U.S., officials said.

  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.eeEnglish
    72·
    5 个月前

    Honestly pretty funny to call the site “Jetflix” and advertise it as nothing but aviation videos. Nobody would know what you’re up to until they pay you.

    How much you wanna bet a aerospace nut subscribed to this because they love Jets, and immediately reported this site to the authorities because he got the avengers movies rather than Airbus maintenance videos or something…

    Pretty stupid though to run this site out of the USA. Terrible opsec. They really just seemed to trust that nobody who cares would ever figure out what they were doing. Plenty of similar sites out there that don’t even need to hide what they are because they are well outside of American jurisdiction.