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.
> 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.<p>Relevant Wikipedia articles:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module</a>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_decryption" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_decryption</a>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sharing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sharing</a>
>> 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.<p>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.
I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it.<p>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.<p>As soon as someone starts making money with someone else's creation, it becomes a crime in my view.<p>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?)<p>But yeah, in cases where someone is this blatantly operating an IPTV service, it's obvious why they got prosecuted.
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.