Most people don’t realize that if you take content you don’t own, you can face serious legal ramifications.
For some reason, people don’t get that you can’t take content you don’t own and use it but they get that you can’t go to your neighbor’s house and just take their car without permission.
Theft is theft.
It doesn’t matter if what you are stealing is a car, actual cash, or content.
Well, a famous YouTuber just learned this lesson the hard way. He has to forfeit more than $30 million in luxury assets including $6 million in cash, Lamborghinis, and McLarens.
Bill Omar Carrasquillo or Omi in a Hellcat’s flashy car collection takes front and center on his YouTube channel, with millions of viewers tuning in to see his Lamborghini Huracán EVO, 1996 Chevrolet Impala, and Ford Mustang.
As part of his sentencing Tuesday, March 7th, he was ordered to forfeit more than $30 million in assets. He had pleaded guilty to charges including copyright infringement and tax fraud.
In short, he launched his own on-demand service for $15 a month, but all of the content was stolen from legitimate services like Comcast, Verizon, FiOS, and DirecTV. Carrasquillo and two other defendants had been hacking the encrypted cable boxes and then streaming and reselling the copyrighted content.
They attracted more than 100,000 subscribers and generated more than $34 million in revenue before federal investigators shut it down in 2019 – making it one of the most brazen and successful cable TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by the Justice Department.
So yes, there are real-world ramifications for stealing content and I hope this case will teach people just that lesson.
You can’t take content that someone else owns and sell it to other people.
Omi in a Hellcat went from baller to prison bitch. Don’t let the same thing happen to you.