Mental Outlaw on Odysee
The Biggest Piracy Bust in History
If you notice that your favorite bootleg streaming service wasn't working this weekend, it's likely because Europol and the audio-visual anti-piracy alliance just collaborated on the largest pirated IPTV bust in history called Operation Taken Down. Now, if you're wondering what IPTV is, it's basically just television streams that are broadcast over the internet instead of traditional cable or satellite connections. It's the way that most households consume content these days, services like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney Plus would all be considered IPTV services. But because broadcasting over the internet has such a low barrier to entry since you don't need your own satellites or your own private cable lines, there's about a dozen or so "pirate" streaming services for every "legit" one. This recent bust targeted 102 suspects across Europe, 11 of whom were arrested for distributing material from streaming services illegally. This pirated content network allowed over 22 million people to access more than 2,500 television channels, including sports broadcast. Over 112 home searches were conducted by police in various countries throughout Europe over the past few days, 100 different websites that served pirated content were seized, and 29 in-home servers that were used in the content delivery network were seized as well. Now, if you remember the early days of internet piracy back when it would take days just to download a single high-definition movie, people would actually sell DVDs with pirated content burn onto them in the streets or in flea markets or bazaars. In fact, these shops that sell bootleg movies are still somewhat common in places where the government doesn't actually heavily enforce copyright laws. Now, one of these physical media street vendors might be lucky to make a couple hundred bucks through belly-to-belly sales throughout the day, but according to Italian police who played a major role in this international piracy bust, the network that they disrupted made an average of 250 million euros every month. The streaming services in TV broadcasters are also claiming that pirated services like this one caused them 10 billion euros worth of damages each year. Now, despite the alleged success of this very huge and supposedly very profitable piracy operation, law enforcement has only so far been able to seize about 1.7 million euros in cryptocurrency in cash. That's basically walking around money if you're running a service that generates three billion euros in revenue per year, so either the people running this IPTV service were some of the best money launderers in the business or more likely the law enforcement agencies that conducted these raids are exaggerating a bit about the amount of money that these pirates are actually making. If we take the figures that we've been given, in order for them to be making 250 million euros per month from 22 million users, they've got to make a little over 11 euros per month per user, which is about what you would expect to pay for a basic tier streaming service. Anyway, now, most of the pirated streaming services don't actually ask you to pay any money. They might give you the option to pay for a premium tier service that gives you more bandwidth and maybe earlier access to stuff and maybe fewer ads, but usually these services let you just watch stuff for free and run really, really intrusive ads on the site that if clicked on are going to link you back to all sorts of scams and malware that tends to get flagged by the big tech ad networks, because if you're running a really shady streaming website, you might as well just accept shady money to run shady ads. But if you know how to pirate, you probably know how to run an ad blocker as well. In fact, some people even consider using ad blockers to be piracy in and of itself. So I doubt that these piracy sites are really raking in billions of dollars per year off of ads for shady boner pills and hot singles in your area. My guess is the revenue that they came up with for these stories comes from the idea that if the pirated services didn't exist, the 22 million people that were using them would just bend the knee and pay for all the different streaming sites that the pirates are stealing content from in the first place. And obviously, that's a bunch of baloney. It's well established at this point that when illegal streaming services get removed, the users typically don't crack open their wallets and start paying hundreds of dollars per month for Netflix Hulu and all the other streaming services, they just move on to the next illegal streaming service and they take their ad blocker with them. Just like how drug dealers will walk a little further down the block to the next trap house after their preferred plug stash house gets raided. Both are a never ending battle, but I think spending all of these resources on protecting streaming companies from supposed revenue loss is a lot harder to justify. Depending on how these companies are structured, piracy sites can actually be beneficial to them. Take musicians, for example, a lot of them these days know that they realistically are not going to make any significant money from their albums, especially if they aren't signed to a major record label who is going to take the lion's share of the profits from their work anyway. So a lot of them actually create albums at a loss once you factor in the money that they pay for beats and samples and features, but that fire album that they get at the end basically acts like an advertisement for their concerts, their merch, and any other revenue streams which are both more profitable to the artist and more immune to internet piracy. But I guess you don't have to worry so much about modernizing your business practices and keeping up with new technology when you've got the authorities in your pocket. Make no mistake that the police in this instance are basically just acting as the henchmen of the streaming services. Most of these businesses are based in the United States, but they could just make a call over to Europe when they notice that their subscription numbers are dwindling in that market and they can get multiple countries law enforcement agencies to protect their interest abroad and spend more taxpayer money on arresting people that share files with one another than they do on fighting real crime. Like there's actual pirates out there that board real ships hurt real people and steal the ship's cargo instead of just making a copy of it and leaving the original version unmodified. And I know a lot of people say that piracy is no big deal because it really just impacts rich Hollywood elites. But how about the fact that these celebrities who you're supposedly stealing from engage in piracy themselves? That's right, even the heckin handmaids tale lady prefers to watch law and order on F movies instead of sitting through the pharmaceutical ads on NBC or paying for the peacock streaming service torrenting bootleg streaming services and all other forms of internet piracy enforcement really is just another example of rules for the but not for me. If you enjoyed this video, please like and share it to heck the algorithm and check out my online store based dot when where you can get awesome merch like the little Damon t shirt and the come and find it hoodie 10% discount available store wide automatically a checkout when paying in my narrow XMR. Have a great rest of your day.