Life’s just great, says Kiwi behind movie 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 the founder of release group 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 saw himself as a criminal, and providing tens of thousands of movies was a ‘‘hobby’’ that he never intended to profit from.
He started YIFY Torrents in 2010, when he was in his first year of computer science at the University of Waikato. He said it was a 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 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.
Eventually, he created a programme which automatically found and uploaded movies to torrent sites.
Swery said YTS got up to eight million hits a day, but he never made much money. And when the movie studios tracked him down, he stopped 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.’’
Despite the fate of his own site, Swery said movies would be pirated as long as the internet existed. He said 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.
‘‘Piracy is theft.’’