Five men have been convicted by a Las Vegas federal jury for their roles in operating the US's largest illegal streaming service, which at one time carried more TV shows than many of the top streaming networks combined.
The service, called Jetflicks, charged users $9.99 a month, generating millions in subscription revenue and causing "substantial harm to television program copyright owners," according to the US Justice Department.
At the peak of Jetflicks' operation, the service boasted more than 183,200 TV episodes, making it larger than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime combined, according to DOJ prosecutors.
The five men who were convicted — Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi and Peter Huber — began operating the service in 2007.
“The defendants operated Jetflicks, an illicit streaming service they used to distribute hundreds of thousands of stolen television episodes,” principal deputy assistant attorney general Nicole Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement on Thursday. “Their scheme generated millions of dollars in criminal profits, while causing copyright owners to lose out. These convictions underscore the Criminal Division’s commitment to protecting intellectual property rights by prosecuting digital piracy schemes and bringing offenders to justice.”
Prosecutors said the group used "sophisticated computer scripts" and other software to scrape various pirate websites for illegal TV show episodes, which they then uploaded to their Jetflicks service.
The men were initially charged in 2019 with conspiring to violate federal criminal copyright law, according to prosecutors. They were eventually convicted for that charge.
Dallman was also convicted on two counts of money laundering by concealment, and three counts of misdemeanor criminal copyright infringement. He faces a maximum penalty of 48 years in prison.
Garcia, Courson, Jaurequi, and Huber all face a maximum of five years in prison, according tot he DOJ.
A sentencing date has not been set.
Jetflicks isn't the only illegal streaming service to fall to copyright law.
Prosecutors said that a member of the original Jetflicks group, Darryl Julius Polo, broke away and established his own site called iStreamItAll.
He charged $19.99 for access to his video library, which — like Jetflicks — was a collection of illegally obtained pirate episodes of popular TV shows.
Polo pleaded guilty to criminal copyright and money laundering charges in 2019, according to the DOJ.
He was sentenced to 57 months in prison in 2020, and was ordered to forfeit $1m in "criminal proceeds" from the site.
