Movie uploader reveals a passion for piracy
THE Kiwi mastermind behind one of the world’s biggest movie piracy groups says his operation was just a ‘‘fun’’ hobby.
A person claiming to be founder of YIFY Torrents and the site YTS, answered dozens of detailed questions to curious ‘fans’ online.
YIFY and YTS were shut down by legal action from an association of American movie studios in October 2015.
In March this year, it was revealed the suit was filed against 23-year-old Aucklander Yiftach Swery. He did not respond to requests for comment this week.
In the online forum, the person claiming to be Swery revealed that he never thought of himself as a criminal, and providing tens of thousands of illegally-sourced movies for download was a ‘‘hobby’’ that he never intended to profit from.
He started YIFY Torrents in 2010, when he was in his first year studying computer science at the University of Waikato. He said it was a good way to teach himself programming.
Despite the illegality of what he was doing, Swery was never concerned with hiding himself from authorities. He said he ‘‘loved bragging about it’’ to friends and family. And he and his friends wore YIFY-branded t-shirts around the University of Waikato campus.
‘‘I was really easy to find, hiding underground was never something that I was aiming for,’’ he said in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) thread on Reddit in May.
Thanks to a programme which found and uploaded movies to public torrent services, the site eventually ran itself, Swery said.
YTS got up to eight million hits a day, but he never made much money.
‘‘The only money you could get is via ad providers. And they are the scum of the internet. We are talking ‘the facebook of sex’ ads,’’ he said.
When the movie studios tracked Swery down, he stopped pirating movies immediately.
‘‘I was never planning to put [up] a fight when that time comes. That might sound cowardly, but keep in mind, this was my hobby, nothing more nothing less.’’
He thought piracy was, in the end, beneficial for movie studios’ bottom lines. Distributing movies for free meant they were seen by people who wouldn’t have bought a ticket or DVD, but who would then pay for merchandise and to see sequels at the cinema.
Swery settled out of court with the movie studios, and said his life was now ‘‘going great’’.
Motion Picture Distribution Association general manager Matthew Cheetham said his group checked out YTS shortly before it was shut down and saw Taika Waititi’s What We Do In the Shadows had been shared hundreds of thousands of times, without anyone paying a cent.