this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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[–] woodenskewer 207 points 5 days ago (2 children)

“substantial harm to television program copyright owners,”

Give me a fucking break

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Those poor, poor, TV execs... They all had to settle for gold plating in their heated in-door pools and Rolls Royces instead of platinum. 😔

[–] Retrograde 46 points 5 days ago (7 children)

Won't somebody think of the television program copyright owners??

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[–] confusedbytheBasics 540 points 6 days ago (17 children)

Proving Netflix could be replaced by five hard working people.

[–] [email protected] 193 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Proving Netflix could be ~~replaced~~ outdone by five hard working people.

[–] ThePantser 92 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Proving Netflix should ~~could~~ be ~~replaced~~ outdone by five hard working people.

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[–] anlumo 120 points 6 days ago (30 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 90 points 6 days ago (5 children)

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

[–] WarlordSdocy 73 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Yeah its almost like if we didn't keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.

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[–] AshMan85 77 points 6 days ago (4 children)

The only reason all companies prices go up these days is for CEO pay packages

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[–] [email protected] 116 points 5 days ago (12 children)

It probably also had better user experience than all of them

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[–] Dorkyd68 116 points 5 days ago (5 children)

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

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[–] Fedizen 106 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 117 points 5 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 days ago (2 children)

If five people can maintain a service bigger than all those combined, then the big streamers need to buck their fucking ideas up.

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[–] Snapz 148 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (13 children)

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.

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[–] Sam_Bass 57 points 5 days ago (8 children)

If there is no need,such places would not exist

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

They probably used Sonarr and Radarr and called it a day (or similar off-the-shelf tools available on GitHub). It's not very sophisticated at all. That combined with Jellyfin and a VPN (or Usenet or a country that doesn't care about piracy) and you have your own up and running. You could also just use free sites with an ad blocker instead of paying $10/mo like the service this article is about charged.

Unrelated to all of this: https://rentry.co/megathread

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[–] [email protected] 200 points 6 days ago (7 children)

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.

[–] Wrench 107 points 6 days ago (9 children)

I mean, distributing it isn't a small feat. Plus you need to manage subscriptions, billings, CMS, a front end to navigate the content, etc.

That's no small amount of work, even if they used out of the box solutions for many layers.

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (8 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 135 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (11 children)

"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.

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 6 days ago (25 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

“Sophisticated scripts to scour pirate sites”.

I think we’ve just found a new tagline for radarr and sonarr.

[–] roguetrick 102 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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 59 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (10 children)

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.

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[–] slurpinderpin 119 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (49 children)

I run a massive streaming service too, which is also way bigger than all the streamers combined. It's just only distributed over my private home network. Jellyfin for the win!

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[–] Cocodapuf 53 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I've got one of those too. Plex is great.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 6 days ago (28 children)

ITT: Have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Jellyfin?

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[–] yamanii 36 points 5 days ago

They solved a problem people had after the fragmentation :)

[–] Etterra 78 points 6 days ago

Farewell heroes. I may not have heard of you before, but I shall mourn your departure nevertheless.

[–] muculent 49 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (4 children)

Streaming services become required by law like insurance

Wait, why am I required to pay for a streaming service?

Because it has all of the entertainment electrolytes a human needs

[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 days ago (1 children)

We already have the private copying levy in Germany and some other countries, where you have to pay a fee for several products (printers, scanners, storage media like HDDs, SSDs, SD cards and thumb drives...) due to the potential that you could do (legal!) private copies of copyrighted media on them. The copyright collectives can set the amount of the fees freely (and it's ridiculously high).

This comes shockingly close to the concept already.

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[–] lemmylommy 91 points 6 days ago (10 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It's sad that these people got taken down. Maybe the next people to do it will do it from a country that does not have extradition with the United States, so they would be safe.

Edit: As for payment providers attempting to take such a service down, Monero would be the answer to this.

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