The men made millions of dollars streaming stolen copyrighted content to tens of thousands of paid subscribers, the Justice Department said.
Five men were convicted by a federal jury in Las Vegas this week for running a large illegal streaming service called Jetflicks, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi, and Peter Huber began operating the subscription service as early as 2007, the Justice Department said in a release Thursday. They would find illegal copies of content online that they then downloaded to Jetflicks servers, the release said.
The men made millions of dollars streaming this content to tens of thousands of paid subscribers, according to the Justice Department.
“by contract or law” so just like the legal copyright owner already owns the “wage” associated with the distribution of content by law and they’re entitled to a payment in exchange for the right to distribute the things they own the copyright of and a distributor failing to pay them is therefore committing theft the same way that wage theft is theft?
You do bring up an interesting point. However, the wage in question is value tied to the work that you’ve done. It is inherently a payment for a service not goods. You cannot really “steal/duplicate/pirate” a service. How would it work anyway?
And, the copyright owner didn’t own any “wages”/profit just because you have copyrighted material. This is problematic because goods can be copied hence the need for copyright and patent law. You could get secondhand copyrighted goods and you don’t owe the copyright owner anything.
Oh but you’re ignoring that some people’s wage is linked to the distribution of copyrighted content, not all people who work on movies or music are paid a flat rate, artists and actors often get royalties based on distribution long after the fact so people illegally distributing the content are in fact doing wage theft by offering a service (that in this case they were paid for) without paying the wage owed to the people who accomplished the work and that are bound by a contract that makes them entitled to royalties for the rest of their lives.
Royalties are not wages. It is why we have a different word for it. Would you call a gain in investment a wage? Even if people’s livelihood depends on it, it doesn’t make it a wage. From Cornell Law School: “Wages are payment, usually financial, that an employee receives in exchange for their labor from an employer. Wages include salaries, bonuses, tips, etc.”