• The headline they want you to read: “zomg these master criminals were causing billions in damages!!!1!1”

    The headline everyone else reads: “lmao piracy run by a couple random schmucks has an infinitely better service AND content selection than any corporate streaming service”

        • Let me take this opportunity to get on my soapbox to sat this:

          Peacock Sucks Ass

          NBC / Universal were one of the first movers in streaming with Seeso. Did they learn lessons from Seeso about how to run a good streaming service? No they abandoned it almost immediately basically saying “this whole streaming thing is just a fad, anyway”

          The results? Now its hard to watch those old (genuinely excellent) Seeso shows, and NBC / Universal has managed to make itself late to the streaming party when they were a first actor. And the service itself? Ass. Total cheeks. Major butt. Absolute balloon knot. It always has technical issues AND scanning within an episode is hard because it doesn’t do it in chunks, it acts like a slider in constant motion.

          Conclusion: don’t look at Peacock as the idiot child of the streaming landscape. View it as the logical conclusion to media companies’ corporate greed. They want you to pay money for a service that sucks, that’s chock full of ads (oh! That’s another thing. Where do you get off showing me three minutes of ads, Peacock, who do you think you are?), and doesn’t even work decently right while a lot of these UX problems have been solved for over two decades (DVD scanning is easy and fine).

        •  AAA   ( @AAA@feddit.de ) 
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          13 months ago

          No there isn’t. Companies are incentivised to extract as much money as possible from any given buyer. There is never a “this is enough money, I won’t charge you more” situation. Inevitably every buyer will become a non-buyer, because they were outpriced.

          Competition should solve this issue, but it doesn’t work in media because there’s no two rights holders for star wars content, or marvel content, or whatever. So services cannot compete on the same content, because the rights holders simply won’t let them.

          Copyright is a pest.

      • That and Disney decided they wanted to break (sorry. Let me use the business terms. “Disrupt”) the market by having a vertical integration of streaming platform and production company. The thing is, it did great for the in the short term, but may have harmed them long term. Meanwhile everyone else is now chasing the model that may actually be losing Disney money because short term greed is the only driver in our economy

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

  •  rufus   ( @rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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    3 months ago

    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.

      •  rufus   ( @rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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        3 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.