Pirate programmer walks the plank for role in massive TV streaming operation A programmer at the heart of a huge internet piracy website faces a lengthy prison sentence following five years of legal proceedings and a two-week trial. Cuban national Yoany Vaillant, a permanent US resident, played a key role in the Jetflicks operation, which at one time claimed to host 183,285 episodes of television shows …
Not only that but presumably plays in high quality, without ads (amazon still tries to insert ads even if you pay. Ublock blocks them at least until manifest v3), without DRM, with the right combination of audio and subtitles, and presumably doesn't sell your data to the world and his data broker, and doesn't try to manipulate you into watching something that you didn't want
This is why I don't watch anything these days.. The only way to get anything high quality is to pirate it, and i'm too old not to worry about getting sued
"The only way to get anything high quality is to pirate it,"
I don't even bother with that. Following an unemployment-induced round of cost reduction, I went without a TV - and the associated mandatory license[1]. I still haven't bothered getting another TV, as I found I could not only exist quite happily without one, and my need for content could be satisfied elsewhere. Without a TV license, you are prohibited from watching any BBC[2] content at all, and ANY 'live' TV at all.
I found that I didn't miss BBC content, and anything 'live' can always be seen later on other platforms.
[1] - In the UK, you are required to buy a licence if your household owns a TV set, on the assumption that you will be consuming BBC content and watching 'live' programs..
[2] - No, it stands for 'British Broadcasting Corporation', you NSFW naughty person.
My guilty reality TV pleasure is Gold Rush - gold miners in Canada. Its very stupid.
This is filmed in Canada, and made in the UK by Raw TV, and aired by Discovery. I pay for all the relevant things from Discovery that I possibly could, I have a Sky subscription, I have a Discovery+ subscription, I have a TNT sports subscription. The latest season of Gold Rush has just started airing in the US, it airs on Friday nights at 9 ET, 3 AM GMT.
In the past, you could watch it at 3 AM if you wanted, or it was available on Discovery+ to catch up. This year, Discovery have decided to make this a weekday show in the UK, and are airing it at 9pm on Tuesdays. So, despite paying everything I possibly could, it airs in the US on Friday, and four days later in the UK. If one was to use bittorrent (I would never!), you can watch it ~1hr after it airs in the US.
This is the thing with the more obscure TV. Season 2 will start or whatever and it's 6-12 months before it airs in the UK. Don't even get me start on foreign language TV. We don't all go abroad and point at the egg and chips on the menu when ordering food (though I'll be honest I'm not posh, I have done this in the past many decades ago).
Here's an "ethical" question. What if I used a smartDNS service and paid subscriptions in say America? I could get HBO, Peacock (all the premier league games including 3pm kick offs), American Netflix and Disney+. Am I doing something illegal even though I'm actually paying for these services? Would what I am doing be the equivalent of downloading a car?
As for downloading stuff from an ethical point of view if I pay for the service it's going to be on eventually then I'm paying for it.
These companies actively search for the IP addresses of VPNs to block them. They are quite easy to find - suddenly loads of connections from a single IP address.
You could rent a VPS for about a quid a month, and roll your own VPN, but that may not work either if instead of blacklisting IPs they simply whitelist the IPs of US residential ISPs.
You'd also likely need a US based credit card.
Ethically, that's fine. Whether it's legal though is another matter! (I think it would be legal - you'd only likely breach the contract, but I am not a lawyer etc.)
In the early early days I used VPNs because Netflix in different countries had different content. I found at one point every VPN was blocked near enough (I know I can spin up my own). I've not used a smartDNS for about a year but had absolutely zero issues with it because was just specifically for streaming services only. Whether that's the same now is another matter. US based pre-pay credit cards are pretty easy to get round as well. Though like I said I don't bother anymore. Sailing the seven seas which was off the menu for a long time for a lot of people is now back. What these companies don't realise is their own greed is their downfall. All they had to do was club together and have a couple of streaming services which no one would have a problem with. Instead we get Netflix, Disney, Apple, Paramount, Amazon, Crunchy Roll, Britbox, HBO, Peacock, Hulu (which I know is Disney as is FX), Shudder, MGM+ and the list goes on and on and on.
Exactly.
Pirating went down when netflix became viable. But now, they all have their own services, I've heard pirating is going up again.
I didn't know there were as many as you listed, though. Do they all have exclusives tied to them? I.E. Would you have to subscribe to all to get everything? Crazy, if so.
Most of them do, and those that don't tend to have things that are hard to find elsewhere. For example, while I don't have it, I understand that one of those is mostly a service that people outside the UK subscribe to in order to watch stuff made in the UK. They may not have anything original, but since you can't officially watch all the BBC content without a UK address, it may end up working the same way.
Pretty much and also geo-locked content. FX, Hulu, Stars on Disney are really weird because they have separate details with Now TV (Sky), HBO is Sky Atlantic but not all content. Oh and I forgot Warner Bros who go across Netflix and Amazon amongst others.
It's a proper mess that can only be fixed with a ship and the seven seas.
Didn't the media companies learn from the DVD region locking debacle? In our modern world, trying to control the release of media on a global scale doesn't work. Just release it across the globe within 24 hours and you'll end up with more paid viewers and less piracy.
Sure, it won't completely eliminate piracy (there will always be people who want something for nothing) but it'll certainly make a dent in it and you'll make more money too. Doesn't the fact that people were paying to access this pirate site give you some hints?
Is this about piracy or media streaming companies losing control? The basis of that answer is 'What did Jetflicks do better'?
Not knowing the price of Jetflicks, I cannot answer if this company was strictly price driven, undercutting the market.
How about media companies playing games with their streaming properties? I used to watch Star Trek series on Netflix, and then some ST series on Amazon Prime. Then Paramount, as the content owner, took them away and made them exclusive to Paramount Plus. Next up they doubled the price and forced an 'upgrade' to PP with Showtime - or force feed me advertisements at the old price.
Just one big stupid game - sign me up for a service, and then dump the content I signed up for. Then play games with bundles & prices. Start sneaking in advertisements for a service that was originally conceived to be "ad free", and therefore better than live television.
With 185k episodes, more than any other service, it sounds like Jetflicks gave consumers a one-price, one-stop shop for all their streaming desires. Heck yeah! I would pay for that and not care if the content was pirated, just for the simplicity and getting away from the Bravo-Sierra games.
It's a bit unfair criminalising the developers. Where will it stop ?
Molly White has been vehement in defending the programmer who was done for helping create a cryptocurrency mixer, on the grounds that he was only programming, not money laundering, and if money laundering was the sole conceivable use of his work, so what? It all sounds a bit technolibertarian to me. Is converting display guns to working ones just metal turning? Is converting decongestant to a Class A drug just cookery?
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
If your work enables clearly criminal behaviour, whether online piracy, money laundering or mass killing of civilians, I think you really do have to take some responsibility.
If the financial software was specifically designed for committing fraud, the developers should be and are punished for it. For example, the Madoff Ponzi scheme programmers were imprisoned for knowingly writing the software to automate the scheme. The programmers at FTX who knowingly built in the theft capability have been charged and pleaded guilty for that.
If you're just writing innocuous code and it is used for a malicious purpose, you usually aren't charged and I don't think you should be. For example, if someone was contracted to write a video streaming system which was used, without their knowledge, for this site, they shouldn't be charged. There is an unclear area where you're writing code that could have legitimate or illegitimate uses. In this case, it's not that hard to realize that this is category 3: he knew what he was doing it for, he knew it was illegal, and he decided to do it anyway. That kind of thing has always had the chance to land you with criminal consequences.
I get the appeal for some people to use the service. Given today's financial climate, if you like programmes that are available only on certain providers, it gets very expensive having to subscribe to them all just to see one or two programmes. This came about because, as usual, people at the top were looking at the likes of Netflix, seeing the money they made, and wanted that for themselves. I used to watch StarTrek Discovery, but when Paramount pulled it from Netflix, there was no way I was going to pay for a Paramount subscription just to watch it.
So personally, I just stopped watching the programmes. There's more to life than TV.
You actually watched Disco? My condolences.
Paramount would have to pay me to watch Disco, or Pick-a-Card. Actually, they'd have to pay me _lot_ to watch Disco. Yes, I had 'free' account for three months and had a look at Disco, Pick-a-Card, Strange New Worlds and Below Decks. Prodigy was not then available for the 'free' acount. I took a look and decided that I wasn't watching Disco and Pick-a-Card for free and that there was nothing else worth watching on Paramount so bye.
"Paramount would have to pay me to watch Disco, or Pick-a-Card."
Discovery was terrible, couldn't stomach it. Star Trek it isn't.
Picard seasons 1 and 3 were reasonably TNG-ish, and seeing practically all the old guard of TNG one more time on season 3 was strangely satisfying even if Colm Meaney wasn't included. Thinking back, the premise and plots were a mishmash an AI may have compiled together from TNG episodes and movies. It was fan service but nothing very memorable. (just like most Star Trek franchise films)
Now, the second season of Picard was unbelievably liberal woke shite. And I'm a liberal woke geezer myself!
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But was the punishment received by the actual "controlling mind" behind that site considerably more?
You would hope so, compared to random devs doing a job (it said the guy was only there a few months, interesting to know if he jumped ship for ethical reasons / was he there when the site was shut down, were the devs lied to about what they were doing being OK?* Was it scenario of people taking a job just to pay the bills & bailing as soon as they realised what was going on**)
* Someone may be great at programming but that does not make them immune to being convinced by the smooth talking BS merchant in charge of them that there were no major legal issues in what they were doing.
** Where do you draw the line? I handed in my notice in one post for ethical reasons (before I had a replacement role lined up) because it was beyond what I could morally do even for a short while (& with big financial hit), but I am sure many of us have been in roles we had qualms about, but keeping an income stream meant getting another role lined up before leaving, as instant quit would have been financially damaging so it was a matter of doing some time in a dubious role just to keep the bills paid.
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"...and was proficient in as many as 27 development languages.
Sounds like he could have walked into almost any programming job anywhere with that sort of skill level. Not many people can be proficient in that many languages, least of all when your learning a new one roughly every 6 months.
I'm guessing this piracy operation was being paid by enough customers that they could pay well for the services of this programmer. I doubt it was a choice of desperation. There are people who would do all sorts of illegal things for a multiple of their current salary, even if their current salary is pretty nice.
Banks here have been fined millions for ripping off customers. I guess their programmers could have been jailed too. And the Government got done for "robodebt" - an automated computer driven "debt recovery" scheme that included demanding money from innocent people. Implemented by contractors and public service administration.
In the UK, there's the Post Office scandal. Programmers in there responsible for building a system not fit for purpose, used to steal money from PO operators.
Interesting to speculate why this one particular industry lead to jail terms.
It really comes down to what the programmers knew and intended. If they were told to write a program that rips off customers, yes, they could be punished for it. If they were told to build something more normal which was then used to rip off customers, not so much. For instance, if they were told to build a system that could suggest financial products to people who logged in, then they didn't recommend fraudulent products, the people who wrote the suggestions for that system to present did. All the programmers did there was write something that's annoying.
It's almost the same for flawed systems. If the programmers intended the systems to give the wrong results, they are also guilty. If they did not intend it but did the work so badly, then they could be guilty of negligence, but not of the crime itself. And if they just did a bad job but it wasn't as egregious, then they're not guilty of anything. That is almost entirely independent of what happened elsewhere with the system. You could have a bug in a system which wasn't due to malice or incompetence and the use of that bug could still be a serious crime, or you could have a malicious addition to software which wasn't abused in a criminal way. To establish fault, you have to understand each event in the chain and how that event occurred.
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The court heard that the operation affected every owner of a TV show in the US, costing millions of dollars in losses to the industry.
My understanding is that these losses were from the lack of royalties for streaming the programmes. Which, as with Napster et al, all those years ago, raises the question of would the people using Jetflix have paid to watch those episodes via legitimate means? For certain, a percentage of the subscribers were using Jetflix to get the episode on the cheap, but there would have been a significant fraction who simply would not have watched the programme at all, which could be argued that it is not lost revenue.
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