Justice Department convicts five men for operating massive illegal streaming service

Five men will be jailed for running a streaming service with more content than a heavyweight.

Well, technically they’re going to jail because all this content was stolen in the first place. The U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday that five men have been convicted on multiple charges related to Jetflicks, an illegal streaming service that has been operating since at least 2007. Garcia, all of whom were involved in “Jetflicks” in some capacity, will serve prison terms, although the extent of their sentences is yet to be determined.

The way Jetflicks works is that some sophisticated program mines pirate websites for stolen TV shows and then adds them to the service. In total, Jetflicks streams more than 183,000 TV series, which the Justice Department says is “more than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime combined.”

In addition to the fact that TV episodes are pirated, Jetflicks also generates “millions” in revenue from users paying a $9.99/month subscription fee to access content. The most interesting part of this story is that, according to Variety, Jetflicks was able to evade copyright holders for so long, in part by telling payment providers that it was actually an aviation entertainment company.

Rather than pondering copyright law and the ethics of the carceral state, let’s sit back for a moment.