Five men were convicted of running Jetflicks, a cheap streaming service that bundled more TV shows than Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime combined.
If a streaming service sounds too good to be true, it probably is. In the case of Jetflicks, it was too good to be legal.
A federal judge in Las Vegas has convicted five male defendants for their role in a complex scheme to dump popular television shows and award-winning movies from pirate sites and bundle them with a streaming service called Jetflicks, the Justice Department said in a statement Thursday. . According to the lawsuit, Jetflicks operated as a subscription-based streaming service that allowed users to watch and download copyrighted TV shows and movies without permission from copyright owners.
“The defendants used Jetflicks, an illegal streaming service that they used to distribute hundreds of thousands of stolen television episodes,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. According to the DOJ, the group has seized thousands of copyrighted television episodes that produce a vast amount of content “larger than the combined catalogs of Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime.”
For a monthly subscription fee of $10, users can watch shows on multiple devices and platforms within days of new episodes from official services and channels, authorities said.
“The defendants operate a platform that automates the theft of TV shows and distributes the stolen content to subscribers,” said assistant director David Sundberg of the FBI Washington Field Office, in a statement.
The five are Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi, and Peter Huber. The lawsuit shows that the group obtained content from pirate sites such as SickRage, (also known as SickChill), Sick Beard, SABnzbd, and TheTVDB and offered it in one place to subscribers. At one point, Jetflicks claimed to have more than 37,000 paid users and 183,200 television episodes. Authorities have estimated the financial damage to system owners to be in the millions.
As a legitimate business, Jetflicks eventually ran into problems, such as subscribers sharing logins and passwords, authorities were accused of indicting. Officials also said the group tried to disguise the site as a recreational area for airline fliers after it faced incoming demands to remove unauthorized content.
“When complaints from copyright owners and problems with payment service providers threatened to topple the illegal multimillion-dollar business, the defendants tried to disguise Jetflicks as an in-flight entertainment company,” Sundberg noted.
And just like in the legal business world, about seven years after Jetflicks started, one member of the group broke away to launch a new, competing venture, officials said.
Darryl Julius Polo, known as djppimp, launched iStreamItAll, which allows users to stream and download TV and movies, the lawsuit said. Subscription plans for iStreamItAll (ISIA) have a monthly fee of $19.99, with quarterly, semiannual, and annual options. Similar to Jetflicks, ISIA did not have a license to provide content, officials said. Polo, a computer programmer, pleaded guilty in 2019 to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of criminal copyright infringement. Polo was sentenced to 4.75 years in prison and ordered to pay $1 million in fines.
Jetflicks also had its own corporate structure, authorities said. Dallman carried out operations while Courson and Jaurequi assisted with management including strategic decisions, hiring, and dealing with vendors and payment processors. Programming and coding was handled by Dallman, Polo, and Huber, who wrote and reviewed the computer scripts for the website and mobile applications. That group also handled web development, customer relations, and technical support, authorities said.
In 2016, the secret agent aired an episode of the science fiction show OA, which aired on Netflix, according to the lawsuit. The agent also picked up two episodes of the dystopian series, 12 Monkeyswhich resulted in distributing the episodes without permission from the copyright owner, the authorities wrote.
Courson, Garcia, Jaurequi, and Huber face a maximum sentence of five years in prison, while Dallmann faces a maximum sentence of 48 years in prison, according to the DOJ. A sentencing date has not been set.
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