iStock/5432action(NEW YORK)–Illegal television and movie streaming services Jetflicks and iStreamItAll (ISIA) once boasted of offering over 180,000 and 115,000 pirated television episodes, respectively, on their services, making them two of the largest illegal streaming sites in the world.
Now, the eight men behind these unauthorized domains have been charged with violating federal criminal copyright law which has resulted in the loss of “millions of dollars by television program and motion picture copyright owners,” according to a statement released by the Department of Justice.
Jetflicks, an online subscription-based service that permitted users to stream and download television shows, allegedly reproduced tens of thousands of copyrighted programs and distributed them via their service to their paid subscribers across the U.S.
But at one point, one of the eight men who ran Jetflicks, Darryl Julius Polo, left to start his own competing site called iStreamItAll. Just like Jetflicks, ISIA provided content for a regular subscription fee which included over 100,000 television episodes and more than 10,000 movies. The site even boldly proclaimed that it had more content available than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime.
Jetflicks obtained their content from sites like The Pirate Bay, RARBG, and Torrentz – some of the world’s largest torrent and Usenet sites that traffic in content infringement, according to the DOJ.
The 8 men allegedly “used sophisticated computer code to scour global pirate sites for new illegal content to download, process and store the shows, and then make those episodes available on servers in the United States and Canada to Jetflicks subscribers for streaming and/or downloading,” the DOJ said.
Both Jetflicks and ISIA were also specifically designed to work on a multitude of devices like smartphones, tablets, smart televisions, video game consoles, digital media players, set-top boxes and web browsers.
Polo, who was part of the programming team that built Jetflicks, also built ISIA and used many of the same strategies to quickly make content available on servers accessed by customers.
“Some of the movies offered by ISIA were not yet available for authorized sale, download, or viewing outside a movie theater,” the Department of Justice said.
According to the indictment, the 8 men who have been charged in connection with Jetflicks and ISIA are Kristopher Lee Dallmann, 36; Darryl Julius Polo, 36; Douglas M. Courson, 59; Felipe Garcia, 37; Jared Edward Jaurequi, 38; Peter H. Huber, 61; Yoany Vaillant, 38; and Luis Angel Villarino, 40.
They have been charged with a series of crimes ranging from conspiracy to violate criminal law, money laundering, criminal copyright infringement by reproduction or distribution and criminal copyright by public performance.
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