Two men admit to running illegal streaming sites that rivaled the size of Netflix and Hulu

Cinema Series – Pirate

Two computer programmers in Las Vegas pleaded guilty last Friday to multiple criminal copyright and money laundering charges after an FBI investigation revealed they had been running two massive, illegal online streaming sites: iStreamItAll and Jetflicks.

clipped from article

While i have never heard of these websites before i am aware of other websites that are “competing” with legit services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Video. Websites such as 123movies and Vumoo are just the few that people use that have a limited set of movies and tv shows. It seems to me that iStreamItAll lived by it’s name that the numbers of TV series and movies had a total of what the major websites had if they were one service.

According to justice.gov

Darryl Julius Polo, aka djppimp, 36, pleaded guilty yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, one count of criminal copyright infringement by distributing a copyrighted work being prepared for commercial distribution, one count of copyright infringement by reproduction or distribution, one count of copyright infringement by public performance and one count of money laundering.  In a separate proceeding today, co-defendant Luis Angel Villarino, 40, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.  Sentencing for both defendants will be before U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia, with Polo’s on March 13, 2020, and Villarino’s on March 20, 2020.

Snippit from justice.gov

If find it quite strange that two men were able to create such massive websites. There has to be more people on the team but i guess the two main people get the punishment while the coders and list makers get away. I find it hard to believe two people can just have a massive database and everything was watchable. One thing i do know that is redflag. They charged people to even watch the shows on their website. Only reason to do that is to help cover costs but that in a way keeps a paper trail so that is why they got caught. The other websites have a database of some sort but no files are stored on the websites you are viewing the on and stored on file servers that have certain rules and regulations of what can be uploaded. It’s up to the companies who own the copyrights to send a DMCA. Somehow this is more then a simple DMCA because there were more copyrighted content then Creative Commons and Public Domain content therefore sites were shut down.