United States v. Kristopher Lee Dallmann et al.

Case Information

Eight individuals, including Kristopher Lee Dallmann and Darryl Julius Polo, have been charged with conspiring to violate federal criminal copyright law by running an entity called Jetflicks, an online, subscription-based service headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, that permitted users to stream and, at times, download copyrighted television programs without the permission of the relevant copyright owners. According to the indictment, the defendants reproduced tens of thousands of copyrighted television episodes without authorization and made these infringing programs available to tens of thousands of paid subscribers located throughout the U.S. At one point, Jetflicks claimed to have more than 183,200 different television episodes. One of the defendants, Polo, left Jetflicks and created a competing site based in Las Vegas called iStreamItAll (ISIA) that at one point claimed to have 118,479 different television episodes and 10,980 individual movies. Like Jetflicks, ISIA offered content for a regular subscription fee to viewers around the United States, and ISIA publicly asserted that it had more content than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime. In addition, the two services were not only available to subscribers over the internet but specifically designed to work on many different types of devices, platforms and software including numerous varieties of computer operating systems, smartphones, tablets, smart televisions, video game consoles, digital media players, set-top boxes and web browsers.  

Both Jetflicks and ISIA allegedly obtained infringing works from pirate websites around the world—including some of the globe’s biggest torrent and Usenet sites specializing in unauthorized content such as The Pirate Bay, RARBG, and TorrentDay—using automated computer scripts to locate, download, process, and store the illegal files, and then quickly make that content available on servers in Canada to United States subscribers for streaming and/or downloading. Essentially, Jetflicks and ISIA were two of the largest streaming services in the United States but did not compensate copyright owners for streaming and making available for download the unauthorized works they offered to their paid subscribers.

Besides the conspiracy charge, Dallmann has been charged with additional counts of criminal copyright infringement as well as money laundering in connection with Jetflicks, and Polo faces similar additional charges in connection with ISIA. More information can be found at the DOJ press release here.