What the Jetflicks and iStreamItAll Takedowns Mean for Piracy

For almost a decade, Jetflicks offered one of the best streaming deals out there. For $9.99 a month—less, if prepaid for a longer increment of time—subscribers could access popular shows from across all the major networks and streaming platforms, commercial-free, as soon as the day after they aired. It was like having Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, and a basic cable subscription, all for the price of a fancy sandwich. If that sounds too good to be true, well… it was.

In late December 2016, a Jetflicks subscriber used the service to stream a recently released episode of The OA, a Netflix show with a fervent fan base. A week later, they downloaded two episodes of the Syfy network’s 12 Monkeys. It’s the kind of casual piracy that takes place on countless Kodi boxes and other devices every day, all over the world. Except this time, the customer was an undercover FBI agent.

A grand jury indictment this week charged eight people with allegedly operating two of the biggest illegal streaming sites in the country. They ran not out of some Eastern European server farm, but in Las Vegas, Nevada. They had a customer service line, a US bank account, and even put out the occasional press release. The biggest question might be how they kept going for so long.

Jetflicks and Chill

According to the indictment, which you can read in full below, Jetflicks dates back as far as 2007, the same year Netflix launched its streaming product. Over the years its alleged operators built it into a sophisticated streaming empire, at one point claiming to host 183,000 television episodes and more than 37,000 subscribers.

As detailed in the indictment, the service had fine-tuned the act of automated piracy. The actual indexing of shows was left to third-party software with names like SickRage, Sick Beard, and SABnbzd, automated programs that can scour torrent sites and Usenet for the latest television shows, download them, and use data from a TV database like TVDB to flesh out episode titles, images, and more. What Jetflicks offered was a home base for all of that content, along with a website and apps to help less tech-savvy users reach it.

Jetflicks also didn’t try especially hard to hide what was going on, even after it received a cease and desist notice from the Motion Picture Association of America in November 2012. (Three days after that letter, the indictment alleges, Jetflicks contributor Darryl Julius Polo “searched the internet for ‘mpaa website moles,’ ‘fake mpaa user account,’ ‘correct letter to dmca response,’ and ‘dmca reply.’”) A Twitter account that appears to be associated with the service actively promoted its “JetStamp” rewards program in 2014, for which Jetflicks also issued a press release. The indictment details how alleged ringleader Kristopher Dallmann maintained a Wells Fargo back account in the Jetflicks name, using it to pay for a domain name service provider and server rentals.

It’s unclear why the Jetflicks group worked so brazenly. Yes, there’s ample legal grey area when it comes to piracy, especially in the case of streaming content. The law considers the streaming of copyrighted material a “public performance,” which while still illegal—and carrying up to a year of jail time—doesn’t rise to the level of a felony. Similarly, cases involving the dissemination of torrents have typically wound up in civil courts, rather than criminal.

“The public performance right has never been provided by Congress to be a felony. It’s a misdemeanor,” says attorney Ira Rothken, who defended MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom after the feds seized that site in 2012. “The felonies are distribution and reproduction, and those require a certain number of units in a certain period of time.”

The government claims that Jetflicks engaged in plenty of the latter. “At various times, Jetflicks used the domains jetflicks.mobi, jetflicks.net, and jetflicks.com, as well as servers and computers in the United States and Canada to search for, download, process, store, stream, and make available for download infringing television programs,” the indictment says.

Which is to say, rather than simply point users in the direction of a pirated show, Jetflicks allegedly stored that content on its own servers in the US. And it allowed customers not only to stream but to download those shows to their own devices, upgrading the charges from “public performance” to “distribution,” and a conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, which comes with up to five years of jail time. The government claims that Polo went one step further, creating a separate piracy service called iStreamItAll that streamed movies like Us and Finding Dory before their commercial release—another felony, also punishable by up to five years in prison. Additional money-laundering charges carry a penalty of up to 20 years each.

When the FBI raided the two Las Vegas homes Dallmann allegedly used in connection with Jetflicks on November 16, 2017, they found “tens of thousands of downloaded video files and thousands of torrent files,” including multiple copies of every episode from Game of Thrones season 7. They seized 33 hard drives, 28 Mac mini computers, and dozens of other assorted tablets, computers, phones, thumb drives, and equipment.

A Pirate’s Life

Unlike other recent high-profile piracy cases, such as the ongoing litigation against alleged KickassTorrents proprietor Artem Vaulin, the Jetflicks and iStreamItAll case seems unlikely to break new ground. But it at least illustrates where the line is currently drawn between streaming and distributing, and what happens when you cross it.

The case also offers a glimpse into just how sophisticated these operations can be. In a chat cited in the indictment, Dallmann says Jetflicks at one point made $750,000 in a single year. Like any good media company, it sought to meet customers where they are, “working on ideas to increase profitability and encourage additional subscribers and subscriber renewals; and helping determine popular television programs based on clicks and and feedback from customers and then using that information to download these or similar shows,” the indictment says.

In a fit of apparently unrealized irony, Jetflicks suffered the same plague of password-sharing that its legitimate competitors do—and took a more hardline stance against it than Netflix and HBO have. The indictment alleges that the Jetflicks team would search the internet to find anyone sharing their logins, and sought to “prevent individuals from ‘stealing’ Jetflicks content.” It also claims that Dallman even discussed adding a form of digital rights management to the files on the Jetflicks server, for improved security.

None of the defendants have yet been taken into custody, even though it’s been nearly two years since the raid that shuttered Jetflicks. (iStreamItAll was operational until just after the charges were brought.) It’s also unclear why the Jetflicks case is unfolding in Eastern Virginia, given that those charged in connection with the crimes don’t live there. “The case raises red flags that the government may be involved in forum shopping,” Rothken says. “The center of gravity looks to be in Las Vegas, in the Ninth Circuit, while the case seems to be located in a favored government federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.” The Justice Department declined to comment.

However the case plays out from here, it signals that the piracy wars are far from over. In fact, as the proliferation of subscription services continues unabated, they may only just be warming up.

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