Authorities say that Jetflicks was one of the biggest illegal streaming services in the U.S. This week, a federal jury in Las Vegas found five men guilty of running the service.
The streaming service Jetflicks costs $9.99 a month. The company made millions of dollars from subscriptions and did “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,” the Justice Department said Thursday.
According to prosecutors, Jetflicks once said it had more than 183,200 TV shows, which is more than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime Video put together.
Court papers and evidence shown in court say that the five men—Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi, and Peter Huber—were in charge of the Jetflicks streaming service as early as 2007. Federal officials say the group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to search piracy sites like the Pirate Bay and Torrentz for illegal copies of TV shows. They then downloaded these episodes and hosted them on Jetflicks’ servers. In 2019, the guys were charged with planning to break federal criminal copyright law.
The judges found the five men guilty of planning to break the law by stealing someone else’s work. The jury also found Dallmann guilty of three counts of misdemeanor criminal copyright infringement and two counts of money laundering by hiding. The Justice Department says that Dallmann could spend up to 48 years in prison and that Courson, Garcia, Jaurequi, and Huber could each spend up to five years in prison. The date of the punishment has not been set yet.
Federal officials say the defendants “tried to disguise Jetflicks as an aviation entertainment company” when copyright owners and payment service providers said they would shut down the illegal business.
The head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, senior deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri, said in a statement on June 20 that the defendants ran Jetflicks, a fake streaming service that they used to share hundreds of thousands of stolen TV shows. It was a criminal plan that made them millions of dollars while copyright owners lost money. These sentences show that the Criminal Division is serious about protecting intellectual property rights by going after digital theft schemes and catching the people who do them.
According to federal prosecutors, Darryl Julius Polo (aka “djppimp”), a member of the original Jetflicks group, went to make a competing site called iStreamItAll, where subscription plans cost $19.99 a month. Officials said that both Jetflicks and iStreamItAll did not have the right to share TV shows and movies on their platforms. Police say Polo admitted to breaking the law by using someone else’s work without permission and moving money in 2019. He was given a 57-month prison term and told to give back $1 million in “criminal proceeds” in 2020.
