Five men were convicted by a federal jury in Las Vegas this week for his or her part in operating Jetflicks, which officials say was certainly one of the biggest illegal streaming services within the U.S.
Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per thirty days for the streaming service, generated tens of millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,” the Justice Department said Thursday.
At one point, Jetflicks claimed to host greater than 183,200 TV episodes — a lineup larger than the combined catalogs of Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime Video, in accordance with prosecutors.
In line with court documents and evidence presented at trial, starting as early as 2007, the five men — Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi and Peter Huber — operated the Jetflicks streaming service. 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, in accordance with federal prosecutors. The boys were charged in 2019 with conspiring to violate federal criminal copyright law.
The jury convicted the five men of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. As well as, the jury convicted Dallmann of two counts of cash laundering by concealment and three counts of misdemeanor criminal copyright infringement. Dallmann faces a maximum penalty of 48 years in prison, while Courson, Garcia, Jaurequi and Huber each face a maximum of 5 years in prison, in accordance with the Justice Department. A sentencing date has not yet been set.
In line with federal prosecutors, when complaints from copyright owners and issues with payment service providers threatened to bring down the illegal outfit, the defendants “tried to disguise Jetflicks as an aviation entertainment company.”
“The defendants operated Jetflicks, a bootleg streaming service they used to distribute a whole bunch of hundreds of stolen television episodes,” principal deputy assistant attorney general Nicole Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a June 20 statement. “Their scheme generated tens of millions of dollars in criminal profits, while causing copyright owners to lose out. These convictions underscore the Criminal Division’s commitment to protecting mental property rights by prosecuting digital piracy schemes and bringing offenders to justice.”
In line with federal prosecutors, a member of the unique Jetflicks group, Darryl Julius Polo (aka “djppimp”), left to create a competing site called iStreamItAll, whose subscription plans had a monthly fee of $19.99. Like Jetflicks, iStreamItAll didn’t have permission to distribute the TV and movie content on the platform, officials said. In 2019, Polo pleaded guilty to criminal copyright and money laundering charges, in accordance with the Justice Department. In 2020, he was sentenced to 57 months in prison and ordered to forfeit $1 million in “criminal proceeds.”
