surely this is a better use of time and money then giving everyone housing, food, and healthcare.
Corpos
pay them for this serviceappreciate the justice served, and providing housing, food, and healthcarecosts money, not makes moneyisn’t part of law enforcement’s job duties.And it of course falls out of nature that the state would enforce IP for private actors with infinite funds because it cares so deeply about promoting creativity…
Exactly. You get it. They only do this to help us little folks out. It’s out of love and compassion, that they allow the corpos to sue the living shit out of everyone for no true good reason. It’s not out of greed. Why can’t we understand that?!
Somebody has to protect the artists
Isn’t that illegal? Can’t someone argue that it looked legit and otherwise they definitely wouldn’t have paid for it?
Like undercover police can’t go around asking people if they want to buy some illegal drugs
At least under US law, you could argue that, but the judge would shut you down. Police can absolutely go around offering you drugs and arrest you if you accept, because they’re not convincing or coercing you into doing it, you’re doing it of your own free will.
Italy seems to agree with your argument a bit more, so we’ll see how this pans out.
John DeLorean had a very high profile cocaine trafficking case where he successfully defended himself at trial due to entrapment as the FBI created the situation where DeLorean committed a crime
It sounds like they’re trying to demonstrate a need for a new law.
I found the article hard to read. Not sure if anyone else did.
In any case, if an IPTV site asks you for the full name and/or credit card info, I’d be very suspicious. Lol
Somehow in Italy many of this sites ask payment with “ricarica Postepay” which is the stupidest payment method ever because:
- You can’t do it online but you need to physically go to a post office and waste 30 minutes in an endless queue (ok, you can do it online, but only if you have a checking account with the post office and you enabled all the online services, which not many do because it has higher fees than a regular bank account while not offering the same service level)
- You need to give your id card to the clerk and he will record it in the database
- You need to give the tax id (similar to SSN) of the receiver
- You need to give the debit card PAN of the receiver (except expiration or CVV)
It’s the most traceable payment method that’s available in the country, I have no idea why so many IPTV resellers on forums and telegram channels use it. Just the fact that the reseller has to publicly give all his personal data to strangers is crazy
(It’s not designed to be used as a payment method, but a way to send money to a relative or a close friend)
So I always laugh when the “post police” (yes we have a police corp for post related crimes) or “tax police” (yes we also have a police corp for tax related crimes) say “we arrested a IPTV resellers” because that often just means “a officer just entered in a telegram channel, got all the necessary PII the perpetrator himself, and searched him in the database”
Edit: first result on Google, can only pay with Bitcoin, ricarica Postepay and bank transfer and in order to proceed you need to send a text message to their fucking WhatsApp
All of three methods are ultra traceable (ok, compared to the “ricarica Postepay”, Bitcoin is a bit harder)
This website has the audacity of saying “Sicurezza e Anonimato con protezioni a livello militare con noi sei al sicuro” (safe and anonymous, with military grade encryption) - anonymous what, need to give phone number and tax id in order to proceed…
Edit 2: news from two weeks ago. 23 users paid for IPTV using that stupid ultra-traceable payment method and of course they were caught in seconds with a simple database search. Prosecutor wanted to give them 2-8 years for “fencing”, judge said “personal use isn’t a crime” https://www.fanpage.it/sport/calcio/il-pezzotto-per-vedere-calcio-in-tv-e-illecito-ma-non-reato-13-pirati-puniti-solo-con-una-multa/
So if real users got acquitted, victims of an entrapment site will be too, as there’s no crime at all
That’s hilarious! Why would they do that? Also the US also has postal police and they’re intense
Why would they do that?
Easy.
Back scratching and you’ve got to remember these community’s / sport / events have global bodies such as UEFA wanting their ching ching.
Them getting off their cushion of sponsors sending them money for the infra, and then doing fuck all other than regulating how the monies comes in is fairly telling how it’s going to affect them both downstream and, upstream :/
What was difficult about reading the article?
I’m not OP, but I would say it’s not a well-written informational article, and the entire argument made by the author is to directly contradict the title.
The author seems to be trying to come off as an investigative journalist, but does so by trying to weave an entertaining story. In the parts where the author does make journalistic points (rather than creative writing) they often aren’t clear about their points. They vaguely mention things without telling you what they think that means. For readers, that means you have to work to glean the actual points from their story, both by deciphering what isn’t creative writing, and by unraveling their unexplained quotations and off-hand statements.
When they finally start getting away from creative writing, you’re subject to a bunch of info and quotations pulled directly from the Repubblica article before finally getting to the meat of the author’s argument (emphasis mine): “The report strongly implies that these sites exist to lure in unsuspecting customers, gather evidence of wrongdoing, then use self-provided names and addresses to issue fines.” There are a couple of quotes that kind of back this up. However the author even agrees that the quotes aren’t really supportive: “It doesn’t state that directly but most reasonable readers seem likely to draw that conclusion.”
But most of the discussion/quotes in this area are just telling you random info from the Repubblica article that is unrelated to this argument anyway.
Then the article takes a left turn and starts randomly talking about sting operation legality in multiple jurisdictions, and some random statements about the (il)legality of IPTV. I think the implication here is that law enforcement wouldn’t do this type of sting since it would be illegal, and what the targets are doing isn’t likely to be deemed illegal anyway. This seems like a weak argument, at best, but it’s the best I can come up with since the author didn’t explicitly tell us their point here.
As a reminder, the title of the article is ‘Bogus Pirate IPTV Portals Run By Law Enforcement “Entrap Hundreds”’. That means you’re going into the article thinking you’re going to get a story about Bogus Pirate IPTV sites. But then the author is basing that title off an article they spend their whole article debunking. That just makes it that extra little bit of difficult to quickly read the article. A more accurate title would have been "Italian Journal Claims Bogus Pirate IPTV Portals Run By Law Enforcement to Entrap Hundreds (But I Don’t Think It’s True) ”.
All in all, I think it’s a difficult read, and most certainly a difficult scan.
Yes, what my fellow Canadian said.
I don’t know, words.
It’s poorly written. The writer is all over the place. The article starts and ends with discussion about a video series from 2004 which is in no way related to the main story, the primary source is a paywalled article in Italian that we can only hope they’re translating accurately, the very first paragraph seems to suggest that there’s no proof to anything else specified in the rest of the article and immediately contradicts the headline… I feel like I learned nothing and wasted time by reading this.
ARE there actually honeypot sites being set up by Italian police? I don’t know, and apparently neither does the author.
In summary, we have an unsourced claim that bogus pirate IPTV portals, designed to deceive “ordinary people” (the term is used twice in the article), have been operated by law enforcement in Italy for the last year. The alleged purpose is to gather evidence in support of an administrative offense punishable by a 150 euro fine, if indeed any offenses were even committed by the hundreds of people reportedly identified.
