5 ms·

Pirate IPTV Co. & Seven Workers Fined After Raids Eight Years Ago

48 points by gslin 3y ago

linuxandrew 3y ago
> Between 2010 and 2016, Engel Systems sold a range of devices that provided illegal access to pirated TV content. The business initially sold TV decoders reliant on card-sharing systems delivered over the internet, before progressing to pirate IPTV services offering access to around 1,600 channels. Relevant Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_decryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_decryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sharing
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
stewx 3y ago
These illegal offshore "IPTV" operators are taking over the streaming market in my area. They have succeeded in marketing themselves to ordinary people via word of mouth and local resellers, and have apparently built enough of a reliable platform that they keep customers.
- eppp 3y ago
  This is also becoming and issue on the ISP side. These IPTV services are causing support calls for slow speeds and tv freezes when in reality it is just the pirate streams having issues.
  - vachina 3y ago
    The ISPs are throttling UDP traffic. In my country they’re known to work with local TV provider to block or cripple streams.
    - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
      How is that going to work with QUIC?
    - eppp 3y ago
      Not on my side. We dont throttle anything.
    - milankragujevic 3y ago
      The pirate IPTV streams are not UDP, they’re HLS vis HTTPS. Often behind Cloudflare.
    - toast0 3y ago
      A service I am aware of has HTTP streams. Video on Demand streams are rate limited by the server to a fixed rate, which is sometimes significantly under the peak bitrate of the file; and the recommended player device doesn't have a large enough buffer for that. That's 100% a service provider issue. Live streams have some issues too, but I haven't debugged those. On the other hand, ESPN+ live streams aren't exactly five nines of quality either.
- tomkaos 3y ago
  Some people think it's legit because they pay for the service and the decoder (firestick with a app) is sold in a real store.
  - dmix 3y ago
    yeah I've talked to those cell phone shop guys that sell them, just for fun to see how it works, and they definitely dont explain what it actually is to you
- grubbs 3y ago
  This is a very accurate statement. Especially when I have non-technical family members buying them and bragging to me about it. Reminds me of the 90's with those cable black boxes that gave you free HBO etc.
throwaway77384 3y ago
I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it. That tends to be where I draw the line (except for perhaps very extenuating circumstances). For me, piracy without profit motive is literally just knowledge / information sharing. I feel as though copyright basically shouldn't exist in cases where someone doesn't profit from reproducing / copying / distributing some kind of content. As soon as someone starts making money with someone else's creation, it becomes a crime in my view. I understand that there is nuance to this...what if someone runs a torrent site and needs funding to keep running the site, thus technically creating some kind of cash-flow / revenue stream. I don't really have the answer to that (except perhaps that we should all just use open-source DHT-based torrent searches, so no funding of centralised sites is needed?) But yeah, in cases where someone is this blatantly operating an IPTV service, it's obvious why they got prosecuted.
- wil421 3y ago
  I’ve felt the same since the time of CD burners. If someone gave me a blank disc I would burn whatever mix tape they wanted. There were kids charging $10-$15 per custom mix but I always thought it was not cool. Then when I saw one of the teen girls on trial for MP3 sharing I decided to keep everything for my self. Pay for Plex schemes are similar to the CD selling of the 2000s.
- api 3y ago
  My opinion on the whole subject of piracy has changed really radically since I was younger. I'm not really a fan of it at all, even without making money, and with making money I think it's definitely not a good thing. The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated. In an economy that is increasingly dematerialized, this is a recipe for extreme wealth disparity and a return to feudalism. Only the owners of physical property would have any ability to earn anything outside service labor. You'd have landlords, large capital-owning corporations, banks, and low-paid no-upward-mobility service jobs. In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor. It also incentivizes locking everything up in the cloud. You can't pirate things if you never have them. Some of this may happen without piracy, but piracy makes it virtually impossible to run a business in any other way. It makes businesses that give you access to data or empower you to run your own software impossible. P.S. The worst form of piracy is the kind that is perpetuated by gigantic corporations. IMHO a lot of the AI revolution is being powered by huge scale piracy. AI is cool but the people providing the training data need to be compensated, especially if their stuff is used to train models that are paywalled and never released. Don't misinterpret my defense of copyright and payment for intellectual labor as a blanket defense of the status quo. A big problem we have is that copyright law effectively no longer binds the largest players.
sandworm101 3y ago
>> Seven employees and managers of Spanish company Engel Systems SL received fines ranging from 540 euros to 7,290 euros for their part in the sale of pirate decoders, plus IPTV boxes and services, through their company over eight years ago. 540 euros? I've seen speeding tickets for more. I haven't gotten one myself but have been physically near to people when they have (sportbikes). Fines like this will do nothing to dissuade people. Imho, this is tantamount to decriminalization of piracy.
- dmix 3y ago
  The company itself also got fined $600k... employees getting fined too is rare so that's definitely a deterrence
- chmod775 3y ago
  For all you know that's the fine their intern got who was making 250 Euro / month at the time and has been unemployed since. Also note this in the article: > The company’s directors were disqualified for seven years, but after certain compensation was paid and the lengthy prosecution delay was factored in, none of those convicted received a prison sentence. Sounds to me like "getting dragged through courts for 9 years" was factored into their punishment. Fines/punishments for individuals handed out by courts are based on the personal situation of those individuals, the degree of their complicity, and many other factors. If you're wealthy fines are going to be substantially higher than if you're making minimum wage. Also if you go in with an obvious and intentional disregard for the law because you do not care about fines, you're gonna wish you hadn't when the court is done listing the digits. Possibly they'll lock you up to boot.
Cheer2171 3y ago
All they have to do is say the copyrighted media is just training data for an LLM and it should be 100% legal.... if I were to believe the average HN post.

48 points by gslin 3y ago

> Between 2010 and 2016, Engel Systems sold a range of devices that provided illegal access to pirated TV content. The business initially sold TV decoders reliant on card-sharing systems delivered over the internet, before progressing to pirate IPTV services offering access to around 1,600 channels. Relevant Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_decryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_decryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sharing

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

stewx 3y ago

These illegal offshore "IPTV" operators are taking over the streaming market in my area. They have succeeded in marketing themselves to ordinary people via word of mouth and local resellers, and have apparently built enough of a reliable platform that they keep customers.

eppp 3y ago
This is also becoming and issue on the ISP side. These IPTV services are causing support calls for slow speeds and tv freezes when in reality it is just the pirate streams having issues.
- vachina 3y ago
  The ISPs are throttling UDP traffic. In my country they’re known to work with local TV provider to block or cripple streams.
  - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    How is that going to work with QUIC?
  - eppp 3y ago
    Not on my side. We dont throttle anything.
  - milankragujevic 3y ago
    The pirate IPTV streams are not UDP, they’re HLS vis HTTPS. Often behind Cloudflare.
  - toast0 3y ago
    A service I am aware of has HTTP streams. Video on Demand streams are rate limited by the server to a fixed rate, which is sometimes significantly under the peak bitrate of the file; and the recommended player device doesn't have a large enough buffer for that. That's 100% a service provider issue. Live streams have some issues too, but I haven't debugged those. On the other hand, ESPN+ live streams aren't exactly five nines of quality either.
tomkaos 3y ago
Some people think it's legit because they pay for the service and the decoder (firestick with a app) is sold in a real store.
- dmix 3y ago
  yeah I've talked to those cell phone shop guys that sell them, just for fun to see how it works, and they definitely dont explain what it actually is to you
grubbs 3y ago
This is a very accurate statement. Especially when I have non-technical family members buying them and bragging to me about it. Reminds me of the 90's with those cable black boxes that gave you free HBO etc.

throwaway77384 3y ago

I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it. That tends to be where I draw the line (except for perhaps very extenuating circumstances). For me, piracy without profit motive is literally just knowledge / information sharing. I feel as though copyright basically shouldn't exist in cases where someone doesn't profit from reproducing / copying / distributing some kind of content. As soon as someone starts making money with someone else's creation, it becomes a crime in my view. I understand that there is nuance to this...what if someone runs a torrent site and needs funding to keep running the site, thus technically creating some kind of cash-flow / revenue stream. I don't really have the answer to that (except perhaps that we should all just use open-source DHT-based torrent searches, so no funding of centralised sites is needed?) But yeah, in cases where someone is this blatantly operating an IPTV service, it's obvious why they got prosecuted.

wil421 3y ago
I’ve felt the same since the time of CD burners. If someone gave me a blank disc I would burn whatever mix tape they wanted. There were kids charging $10-$15 per custom mix but I always thought it was not cool. Then when I saw one of the teen girls on trial for MP3 sharing I decided to keep everything for my self. Pay for Plex schemes are similar to the CD selling of the 2000s.
api 3y ago
My opinion on the whole subject of piracy has changed really radically since I was younger. I'm not really a fan of it at all, even without making money, and with making money I think it's definitely not a good thing. The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated. In an economy that is increasingly dematerialized, this is a recipe for extreme wealth disparity and a return to feudalism. Only the owners of physical property would have any ability to earn anything outside service labor. You'd have landlords, large capital-owning corporations, banks, and low-paid no-upward-mobility service jobs. In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor. It also incentivizes locking everything up in the cloud. You can't pirate things if you never have them. Some of this may happen without piracy, but piracy makes it virtually impossible to run a business in any other way. It makes businesses that give you access to data or empower you to run your own software impossible. P.S. The worst form of piracy is the kind that is perpetuated by gigantic corporations. IMHO a lot of the AI revolution is being powered by huge scale piracy. AI is cool but the people providing the training data need to be compensated, especially if their stuff is used to train models that are paywalled and never released. Don't misinterpret my defense of copyright and payment for intellectual labor as a blanket defense of the status quo. A big problem we have is that copyright law effectively no longer binds the largest players.

sandworm101 3y ago

>> Seven employees and managers of Spanish company Engel Systems SL received fines ranging from 540 euros to 7,290 euros for their part in the sale of pirate decoders, plus IPTV boxes and services, through their company over eight years ago. 540 euros? I've seen speeding tickets for more. I haven't gotten one myself but have been physically near to people when they have (sportbikes). Fines like this will do nothing to dissuade people. Imho, this is tantamount to decriminalization of piracy.

dmix 3y ago
The company itself also got fined $600k... employees getting fined too is rare so that's definitely a deterrence
chmod775 3y ago
For all you know that's the fine their intern got who was making 250 Euro / month at the time and has been unemployed since. Also note this in the article: > The company’s directors were disqualified for seven years, but after certain compensation was paid and the lengthy prosecution delay was factored in, none of those convicted received a prison sentence. Sounds to me like "getting dragged through courts for 9 years" was factored into their punishment. Fines/punishments for individuals handed out by courts are based on the personal situation of those individuals, the degree of their complicity, and many other factors. If you're wealthy fines are going to be substantially higher than if you're making minimum wage. Also if you go in with an obvious and intentional disregard for the law because you do not care about fines, you're gonna wish you hadn't when the court is done listing the digits. Possibly they'll lock you up to boot.

Cheer2171 3y ago

All they have to do is say the copyrighted media is just training data for an LLM and it should be 100% legal.... if I were to believe the average HN post.