Two Las Vegas Men Plead Guilty in U.S. Criminal Streaming Piracy Case (opens in new tab)

Could you imagine how great these services would be if copyrighted works fell into the public domain after 28 years instead of the nearly 100 years they are now?

I just got back from vacationing in Greece and Croatia. Though I can't say whether the number of movies was higher or lower than in the states, I can say that the quality of films was much higher. Both my girlfriend and I complained multiple times that the movies we were watching in Europe were not available to us in the states.

The major difference is that the EU does not behave like a unified body when it comes to purchasing the distribution rights. So Netflix negotiates with each country individually.

Unless you share it with family so more people get value out of it, it is indeed hard to justify the subscription for many people.

Edit:

> make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada

Is this a real protection against getting caught? I would have imagined Russia or the Ukraine to be better options for being outside of the reach of the FBI.

I know it isn't quite as bad, but in the US, many European (or other foreign) are practically impossible to watch legally. Streaming services don't stream them, and dvds and blu rays are region-locked.

Just yesterday I read something about the show "White Collar" and checked it out on Amazon Prime Germany. In German language it is available for free. I like to watch shows in their original language though. English costs 4€ per episode. Alright then, torrent it is.

Frankly the cost in the US isn't necessarily worth it anymore. I've been a Netflix user since 2008/2009. Back when no one took VoD seriously, the catalogue was huge. You could actually get lost trying to find something because there was so much good content. Now, with every company attempting to cash in on their own platform, choices on a single platform are very, very limited. I've also noticed that many titles are shared between Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon so the illusion of choice is really just that.

I think original titles and foreign distribution (ie getting content from not your nation) are quickly becoming the only differences. That's what cable was when I moved away.

I have, quite honestly, consumed everything I'm incredibly interested in on the majors. None of them turn out originals fast enough to keep my interest and new/returning content comes in a trickle so I've recently turned to just buying old shows I like and watching those. It's just like the nineties/aughties all over but without the hope of what was then cable cutting.

I'm in the US and currently scratching my head as to why the hell I haven't canceled my subscription years ago.

For as long as I can remember now, every Netflix experience boils down to spending 15-30 minutes looking for something remotely interesting before finally giving up and reading a book or playing a video game instead.

I'm not sure how much of the problem is them not having enough content, versus just their (at least on Android) godawful UI making it impossible to find, but the end result is the same.

Is the price cheaper in regions where the catalog is slim?

I guess Netflix needs their developers for all the random UI changes nobody is asking for and some "unrelated recommendations" engine.

The article has been updated to reflect that they had more content not more subscribers.

> “Polo pitched his service to potential clients by pointing out that it offered more content than competing legal services such as Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime.”

Total revenue was less than a couple million dollars.

The cynic in me would say they did not spend half their time building resumé-ware. But the numbers are probably totally wrong.

Something is fishy about this. Netflix's infrastructure is massive, and their bandwidth usage is a big chunk of the entire internet. How could this possibly go unnoticed for any amount of time?

They were just running streaming software in front of existing torrent and NZB content. That's why they could scale relatively easy and why they were caught.

To be fair, it was a really big garage.

I would be super interested in a detailed breakdown of their stack, I assume something built on p2p was used, otherwise the compute, bandwidth, and storage costs would be insane.

The numbers don't add up.

and yet they are getting punished for it, what a world we live in, right?

Copyright and patent authority is explicitly granted to the Federal government by Art. I, Sec. 8 of the US constitution:

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

As such, state courts and police forces have no jurisdiction over copyright issues; they must be handled by the federal courts and police force (the FBI).

(Text from https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri... )

Who else is going to do it? Your local municipal cops?

I believe it's because it's an inter-state crime. Once crimes cross state borders you have to get the federal level police involved, which is the FBI.

Think of the FBI as the police for the federal government. Roughly, as soon as your typical crime goes across state lines, they can get involved (because a state's jurisdiction ends at their borders).

Streaming is a service question. Netflix/D+/AMZN offers you a limited catalogue for 10$ or so a month. You select a movie from their website and it starts playing on your phone or computer.

Pirates offer you everything for free. You select a movie from their website and it starts playing on your phone or computer.

Why would any customer pick the more expensive product? Netflix and Friends need to offer a better service and experience at a low price. Notably that will have to include one subscription for everything.

Steam from Valve has been extremely successfull because they offer a very good service for fairly good prices. Now that EGS is trying to bleed customers, video game piracy is going up again because nobody likes exclusives except those that get money for them.

One thing that might have happened to me earlier this year is I had a use case come up where I could not access my paid subscription service in the environment where I needed/wanted it most.

The (this is imaginary and made up for legal reasons) use case was I was in a limited network environment, trying to watch game of thrones when I paid for an HBO subscription. The HBO subscription offered my access through the app on my phone, but only streaming it, and with a horribly designed buffering system. It would only buffer a small portion after the current part of the video, so basically, and I could not download it to my phone through their app, so it was impossible to watch game of thrones when I wanted on release date and risk possibly running into spoilers the next day.

I would have had to resort to downloading it illegally over torrent because the subscription systems "say they solve your problems" and offer a completely legal way to watch your episodes, but miss the use cases for the small few of people who want to watch in limited internet situations. I am not a common user, I am power user, and I have not just had this type of situation happen once.

So my question now is, why even pay for the subscription service when it doesn't work when I need it most?

When torrenting was more of a common thing, you literally couldn't legally pay to stream or download like anything. Heck, you could barely even find DVDs of a lot of content or they'd be available like a year after the shows aired or movies were released.

Now, it's way easier than ever to be able to do it all legally and quickly, and it's not even that expensive. If you want to watch old seasons of a show sure it's a hassle to sign up and then cancel a subscription to a specific network, but it's not that hard and it's like $6-$15/mo with no contracts. It used to be that a DVD box sets were like $30+ for one show.

Well, TFA says:

> "Specifically, Polo used sophisticated computer programming to [get pirated stuff] and then make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada," officials said.

So the fact that they were in the US is irrelevant.

But I'm sure that they got caught because they didn't know how to stay anonymous. Or were too lazy. Or got too greedy.

I mean, there are far better hosting alternatives than Canada. I guess that they wanted low latency for US customers. But still, they should have isolated themselves from the damn servers.

I'm guessing that it was their payment setup that got them pwned.

Because the current streaming service landscape is kind of awful?

My mind is blown that these sites were actually getting paid subscribers. I thought the beauty of piracy is the whole "not paying for it" thing.

I refuse to pay for more than one subscription service, I'm not going to end up paying more than I did for cable tv. Hulu still wins for me because it has the live/local tv, and I'm not giving Disney anymore money.

Except I can cancel anytime, pay for just a month, watch whenever I want, watch however I want.

I'm surprised some foreign power hasn't done this just for the sole reason of messing with the US movie industry, which is one of America's more significant export industries, and thereby harming the American economy.

The DOJ presser said the site was "larger" than Netflix, Hulu and Amazon combined in terms of available content - some media reports have misreported it as larger by subscriber count

Or law enforcement trumping up a number that’s larger than any reasonable number of subscribers they actually had.

I think it was a typo, later in the article they mention this service had more content than Netflix, Hulu etc. I share your scepticism that two individuals could build a streaming service catering to >160m customers.

Not to mention the infrastructure, even if they didn’t host the video content themselves (which I doubt?) just handling that many paying customers would be a major operation.