Two Plead Guilty to Piracy with Streaming Video Subscription Services

Two streaming video pirates are getting coal in their Christmas stockings this year. Four months after their indictment by a grand jury, two Las

Two Plead Guilty to Piracy with Streaming Video Subscription Services

Source: Department of Justice

Two streaming video pirates are getting coal in their Christmas stockings this year. Four months after their indictment by a grand jury, two Las Vegas men pleaded guilty to video piracy, copyright infringement and money laundering. Eight men total were charged with operating Jetflicks and iStreamItAll, headquartered in Las Vegas. The two men who pleaded guilty – Darryl Julius Polo, aka djppimp, and Luis Angel Villarino – could receive reduced sentences as a result of the plea and by agreeing to fully cooperate in the ongoing investigation. The other six defendants will go on trial on February 3, 2020. According to the Department of Justicess indictment, it is estimated that TV and movie copyright owners have lost millions of dollars from illegally streamed and downloaded content.

Polo, 36, pleaded guilty 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, said the DOJ in a statement.

Torrent Freak says the copyright offenses have a maximum penalty of five years in prison and money laundering could earn Polo up to 20 years in jail. Polo will be sentenced on March 13, 2020. In a separate hearing, Villarino, 40, a computer programmer for Jetflicks from December 2016 until June 2017, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement with a maximum penalty of five years in jail. He will be sentenced on March 20, 2020. Both men will be required to pay restitution, and the money they earned illegally will be forfeited.

In Polos plea agreement, he acknowledged running a site called iStreamItAll (ISIA), an online streaming subscription service, that offered videos obtained from pirate sites. Subscribers could stream and download copyrighted TV shows and movies without permission from the copyright owners. Polo said ISIA offered more than 118,479 TV episodes and 10,980 movies, more content than offered by competitors like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime. To grow the ISIA subscriber base, Polo emailed potential customers about ISIAs catalog of offerings, recommending they cancel their current streaming video services. Polo also said he ran other piracy services including a Usenet NZB indexing site called SmackDownOnYou, BoxBusters TV, Jailbreakingtheipad and MixtapeUG.

In Polos and Villarinos plea agreements, the men admitted they worked as computer programmers at Jetflicks, another subscription-based streaming video service. They reproduced tens of thousands of TV episodes obtained from pirate sites and then made them available to Jetflicks subscribers in the U.S. and Canada for viewing and/or downloading.

Visitors to the iStreamItAll site will see this message:

Two Plead Guilty to Piracy with Streaming Video Subscription Services

Source: Department of Justice

Insider Take:

You know that FBI and video piracy warning you see at the beginning of a DVD, the one you wish you could fast forward through but cant? This is what they are talking about – the unlawful use of copyrighted material for personal gain. While the DOJ originally estimated millions of dollars were lost by copyright owners, based on the number of TV episodes, movies and subscribers, we think the amount lost is significantly higher. The total dollars lost and the damage done can never really be measured. The bottom line is that copyright violations are real. It may seem harmless to share copyrighted material, but intellectual property rights are just as valid as real property rights, even though are less tangible. It will be interesting to see if the other six defendants will negotiate similar pleas, knowing that two of the original eight are fully cooperating with the DOJ. This is a “no win” situation for them.

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