Pirate Programmer Walks The Plank For Role In Massive TV Streaming Operation

A programmer at the heart of a huge internet piracy website faces a lengthy prison sentence following five years of legal proceedings and a two-week trial.

Cuban national Yoany Vaillant, a permanent US resident, played a key role in the Jetflicks operation, which at one time claimed to host 183,285 episodes of television shows to stream and download – more than any of the major streaming services today.

The 43-year-old, who, like Jetflicks, was based in Las Vegas, was said to have 15 years of experience as a programmer and was proficient in as many as 27 development languages.

He only worked at Jetflicks for four-and-a-half months, but made "significant contributions" to the site during that time, according to prosecutors.

These included fixing bugs related to the extensive automation processes that powered Jetflicks, such as the downloading, processing, syncing, uploading, and streaming of the website's catalog.

The Justice Department said Jetflicks ran automation scripts "nonstop." These scripts would scour the internet's most popular piracy sites, like The Pirate Bay, RARBG, altHUB, and Nzbplanet, for content that could be hosted on Jetflicks to paying subscribers.

Jetflicks would routinely find ways to host episodes of TV shows within a day of them airing for the first time. The court heard that the operation affected every owner of a TV show in the US, costing millions of dollars in losses to the industry.

Tens of thousands of people paid for Jetflicks and the case is considered the largest ever related to internet piracy, in terms of the volume of stolen content. Experts reckon that those involved in running the website, which started up in 2007, made millions from customer subscriptions.

Vaillant was one of eight individuals indicted back in 2019 for playing a key role in Jetflicks' success, including two other software developers, Darryl Polo and Luis Villarino. Polo was sent to prison for four years and nine months – longer than Villarino's one year and a day – due to the additional charges on top of criminal copyright infringement, which related to money laundering and running iStreamitall, a separate illegal streaming site.

The other five were also convicted in June. Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi, and Peter Huber were all found guilty of criminal copyright infringement charges, while Dallmann had a longer rap sheet that included three additional counts of copyright infringement and two for money laundering by concealment.

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"The defendants conspired to operate an online streaming service that unlawfully reproduced and distributed thousands of copyrighted television programs for their own personal gain," said US attorney Jason M Frierson for the District of Nevada following the trial.

"This case is another example of our steadfast commitment to combat intellectual property theft and to hold accountable those who violate intellectual property rights laws."

The court heard that when the walls were closing in on Jetflicks, after legal complaints and issues with payment service providers began to mount, the operators tried to conceal the nature of the service by changing it into JetFlix, a platform seemingly devoted to streaming aviation content. It fooled nobody.

Vaillant and the five other operators are set to be sentenced on February 3-4.

Similar clampdowns on the facilitators of illegal streaming services are being seen across the UK and beyond, particularly with those who create and sell so-called "dodgy Firesticks" – jailbroken Amazon Fire TV devices that allow users to stream all kinds of content, including TV, film, and sport for free.

Jonathan Edge, 29, from Liverpool, was the latest to be handed a prison term for his role in distributing these devices. He was sentenced to three years and four months.

Months earlier, Kevin James O'Donnell, 41, also from Liverpool, was given a two-year suspended sentence for running a dodgy Firestick scheme, netting himself tens of thousands of pounds. ®