WASHINGTON—A federal grand jury has indicted eight people for running an illegal streaming service that allowed its paying subscribers to pilfer “tens of thousands of copyrighted episodes without authorization.”
The indictment, filed in the eastern district of Virginia, charged the employees of “Jetflix”—a Las Vegas online subscription-based operation that permitted users to stream, and at times, download copyrighted television programs—of violating copyrights. At one point, according to the indictment, Jetflix claimed to have more than 183,200 different television episodes.
One of the defendants, Darryl Julius Polo (aka “djppimp”) left Jetflix to start a rival, “IStreamItAll” (ISIA), also based in Las Vegas. That service, which stored up to nearly 116,000 different TV episodes and more than 10,000 movies, used a server in Canada to avoid detection.
Jetflix apparently stole its content from pirate sites worldwide, including some of the world’s largest torrent and Usenet P2P sites, specializing in stolen material like Pirate Bay, RARBG and Torrentz. They use various computer scripts, often providing episodes to subscribers the day after the shows aired on television. Some of the movies aired on ISIA—which had monthly subscription plans starting at $19.99 per month—were made available even before public release.
The two services allowed subscribers to stream content on any digital device, including smartphones, tablets, web sites and gaming consoles.
In addition to the multiple counts of copyright infringement, another of the eight defendants, Kistopher Lee Dallmann, was also indicted on four counts of money laundering.
