Eight U.S. Citizens Face Criminal Charges for Running Streaming Services

• Eight people in the United States were charged with an indictment and will face the grand jury soon.
• According to the U.S. Justice Department, the eight defendants were running two large pirate streaming platforms.
• The culprit websites are Jetflicks and iStreamItAll, both of which are still up and running.

Eight individuals have been charged with an indictment on the basis that they run two large streaming services, namely “Jetflicks” and “iSteamItAll”. Both websites are still up and serving the tens of thousands of their visitors. The eight U.S. citizens that are now facing criminal charges have allegedly caused copyright owners damages that are accounted to many millions of dollars, as the two pirating platforms have offered a rich galore of films and TV series. Characteristically, Jetflicks is reported to have offered more than 183200 TV episodes at some point in the past, as the report of the Justice Department details.

The names of the eight individuals are Kristopher Lee Dallmann, Darryl Julius Polo, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Edward Jaurequi, Peter H. Huber, Yoany Vaillant, and Luis Angel Villarino. According to the indictment, Darryl Julius Polo has left Jetflicks at some point to create iStreamItAll, so he is the only person who is involved in both platforms. Polo had co-created Jetflicks together with Dallmann, so these two are charged with money laundering, criminal copyright infringement by reproduction and distribution, and also criminal copyright by public performance.

The Justice Department claims that the subscribers of these two services are distributed mainly across the U.S.A. and Canada and that they used smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, video game consoles, web browsers, and set-top boxes to access them and consume pirated content. Most of what was available on these platforms were acquired through illegal sources such as The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, and RARBG, so the admins had to practically download thousands of torrents in order to populate their streaming services with luring content.

Only a couple of days back, we have written yet another piece of news that concerned a lobbying effort to make pirate streaming services a crime. This proposal has been rejected in Canada in June, but in the United States, it is still under serious consideration. This case of Jetflicks and iStreamItAll isn’t a good indicator for streaming lovers, as getting charged with an indictment from the Department of Justice and having a grand jury determine if you have committed a criminal offense is way different than having a complaint by a copyright holder submitted to a district court, asking for a financial compensation and the seizure of the associated URLs.

Do you think that pirate streaming services in the U.S. are to get bashed soon? Let us know what you think in the comments section down below, or join the discussion on our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.