It's not theft. It's copying or copyright infringement.
If it was theft, the owners wouldn't have it anymore.
The words matter because they change your moral intuition about it.
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Thank you! This is such an important distinction.
It will be interesting to see how the MPAA tackles Hotfile now that they are restricted in the language they can use. It probably means that the term “copyright infringement” will be used more often than they had hoped.
To be continued.
This was written back in 2013. Does anyone know how that shook out?
The Verge needs to stop making articles like this.
Fucking idiots want to ruin a good thing
.... Or they're trying to?
Yeah, it feels like a “loose lips sink ships” situation… But on the other side of the same coin, there’s no way the TV providers were ignorant of this. They undoubtedly already knew, so it’s not like this article is going to bring anything new to light. If anything, it may put a target on the backs of some of the people who were quoted in the article for litigation, but that’s not going to actually stop the boxes from being sold in the long term.
lets be honest though. piracy used to be seen as this super complicated thing hackers did. now that the average grandma has tasted the sweet nectar of free media, nobody is going back. what the State doesn't want you to know is that if enough people stop complying with laws, then they lose the capability to be able to enforce them. eventually- too many people won't respect the laws and regardless of the consequences on paper there will be no consequence in practice. there are too few police officers in the united states- even with over policing and mass incarceration what it is, to be able to enforce this.
The market is just going to have to get realistic and realize that you can't nickle and dime people in the era of mass market, high bandwidth, telecommunications.
Thinking about this...I feel this is more:
"Notice me billion dollar cable. Look I'm tattling, now go bribe a congressman that you're upset and don't forget about us once they pass a law"
The fact that they use the term "stealing" for the act of duplicating makes me feel like they're wrecking. I'd take this entire article with a dose of salt.
Yeah, they're definitely trying to fucking rat and snitch
It would be nice if I could know how to use these services without some "box" or "app"
https://iptv.surf/ <- Start here
https://ottiptvprovider.com/search <- Helps find the provider with the channels you're looking for
https://search.streamcheck.pro/ <- Checks the quality of each provider
The article explains that the key services are tied to the hardware & probably controlled (with an attempt at plausible deniability) by the hardware vendors.
Guess someone now needs to come up with a a way to pirate these pirate services 😁
Dodgy boxes have been a massive thing here, and there's so much fearmongering in the news about how they'll steal your internet, bank details and firstborn child, when they're literally just amazon firesticks with some apks on them.
i mean it's partially true.. many of those weird android tv boxes have spyware loaded onto them, mostly for botnet/residential proxies and sometimes infostealers.
I don't doubt that, but these are just firesticks. They're not even rooted.
If I were to deploy one on my network it would certainly be isolated on its own VLAN.
All the public iptv things for british/irish channels get aggressively taken down by sky (company), so it's probably more sustainable for these to exist this way.
Way ahead of you here. Stopped watching TV entirely in the early 1990s.
LibreElec installed on a raspberry pi 4 with a real debrid sub will get you pretty much the same thing for less money.
you wouldn't download a television
I wouldn't mind learning all this magic, seems interesting