For years, pirated IPTVs have been the best method to watch football for free, in addition to accessing content protected behind a paywall, such as films and series from streaming services like Netflix. The priority of rights holders and the police was on other methods of piracy, but this has changed, and in recent months there have been a large number of arrests and trials against the owners of these pirate networks .
The scale of these operations varies greatly, but in most cases they involve direct retransmissions of paid services, accessible by tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people in the most serious cases. The trial scheduled for March 2024 in the United States will make all these cases seem small, because it will affect two of the biggest piracy platforms of the country and, by extension, the world.
It’s quite an epic story and, technically, the trial hasn’t started yet; The process began in 2019, when eight people were indicted for opening and running two of the most popular services among hackers: Jetflicks and iStreamitAll. Between them, they offered access to hundreds of thousands of videos, already more content than legal services like Netflix or Amazon Prime could offer. Jetflicks claimed to be an aviation-related service, but in reality it had over 183,000 TV series episodes. For its part, iStreamitAll was more honest in its name, but not in the rest: it offered access to more than 118,000 television series and more than 10,980 films.
The biggest lawsuit against IPTV
The big problem in this case for prosecutors lies precisely in the scale of the intellectual property crime, with more than 700 presentations of evidence in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. As of April 2022, the defendants’ defense received 423 gigabytes of data, including at least 175,000 pages of evidence, such as reports, photos and spreadsheets, which, if printed, would amount to more than 875 kg of paperwork. If that wasn’t enough, the government contributed an additional 18.69 TB (yes, terabytes) of data, including the contents of servers, phones, tablets, hard drives and other evidence obtained from Canada.
Faced with such a large amount of work, the defense enlisted the help of co-counsels to review all the evidence, but the story doesn’t end there. In early 2023, the defense of one of the accused requested more data likely to exonerate his client; and the response was that the lawyer “had to bring their own hard drives” because the required data takes up 63.2 TB of storage and It will take them at least a few months to be copied.
iStreamitAll was a service that allowed you to watch series and films on IPTV
This has been the biggest obstacle to carrying out the trial, but it is not the only one. The irony is that at first it seemed like the prosecution had everything to win, as two of the founders and programmers of JetFlicks and iStreamitAll chose to plead guilty to various intellectual property and money laundering crimes, for which they were sentenced to prison terms. sentences of 57 months and one year and one day in prison respectively. However, the rest of the team decided to fight back, charging illegal searches, denial of basic rights, and even exposing the FBI’s “coercive tactics.”
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