People who run pirate sites and services tend to be pretty interesting individuals. Some are extraordinarily talented and smart, with technical skills that can leave one in awe. Some are funny and insightful too, while others are irritable and almost impossible to deal with.

Surprise. People who work at anti-piracy companies can be pretty interesting individuals too. They also tend to be talented and smart, with technical skills in abundance. In some cases they are some of the nicest people you will ever deal with while some are the nastiest characters around. Like their counterparts, they cover the usual spread of human traits.

In many ways, however, these warring groups of people are very similar, they just approach the same thing from different angles. The aim of pirates is to spread media and the aim of anti-pirates is to stop them from doing so. Put this scenario into a video game and its no different from a team deathmatch. It’s not personal either, it’s just business.

The point is that both ‘teams’ are on the same battlefield and as a result, can benefit from the same strategies. And it can be argued that there has been no greater strategist than Chinese general Sun Tzu, the credited author of The Art of War.

Despite being written 2,500 years ago, the wisdom of this work shines through today. So which of his teachings are most relevant to both sides of the piracy ‘wars’?

Perhaps the most obvious, which underlines the similarities between the factions, is that “to know your enemy, you must become your enemy“. On a basic level, by understanding your adversary deeply, you are able to think how he thinks. Stepping deeper, some ‘pirates’ on pirate sites are not pirates at all, even though they act like them.

“It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.”

Perhaps one of the great ironies of starting a pirate platform is that if it fails quickly, the disappointment comes with a gilded edge – the enemy will never come. Great success, on the other hand, almost certainly means the opposite. Not considering this at the very beginning can be a recipe for disaster.

As Sun Tzu said: “The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”

In 2019 this quote became relevant every time we wrote about small Kodi-addon developers in the UK being targeted by FACT and even the police. The majority of these people seemed to have miscalculated how important their software would ultimately become and, as a result, left a trail of digital breadcrumbs to their front doors.

When the authorities arrive with overwhelming force, a cascade of quotes inevitably follows, all centered around the imbalance of power and the pointlessness of self-sacrifice in an unwinnable battle. Importantly, they know that “supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

That’s what the strongly-worded cease-and-desist letters backed up with a credible threat of civil or criminal prosecution aim to achieve. They don’t want a war, you don’t want to lose, so be sensible and back away now, they say. Or as Sun Tzu put it “build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across” in the hope that the “the wise warrior avoids the battle.“

Of course, there is a valid theory that anti-piracy groups cannot take on the world so if everyone resisted they would be unable to cope with the workload. They know that better than anyone so they pick their fights wisely, in order to project an image of power and present a credible deterrent.

“To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill,” Sun Tzu said. “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

But for some pirates, giving in has never been an option and one needs to look no further than The Pirate Bay to see how Sun Tzu’s teachings have applied again and again. Every single time that site or the people behind it have been targeted, the response has been the same – this will not work and we will never stop.

Host targeted, we have another – and another. Domain targeted, we have a dozen more. Blocked by ISPs, here are a thousand proxies. Or as Sun Tzu wrote, “Convince your enemy that he will gain very little by attacking you. This will diminish his enthusiasm.”

Tying up disproportionate resources in one battle is not prudent, particularly against a resilient enemy such as The Pirate Bay. “If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak,” Sun Tzu taught. “By reinforcing every part, he weakens every part.”

The Pirate Bay, however, is a unique case. Having lost so many battles, they now operate from a position of strength. The site isn’t invincible but there are many softer targets that produce more bang for content providers’ buck – and less embarrassment when it all comes to nothing – again.

When everything is said and done, setting out to achieve anything significant in piracy is a gamble. Sun Tzu probably has something to say about that too, but a Chinese proverb explains things perfectly. It’s a plan that should never be deviated from, if survival needs to be ensured.

“If you must play, decide upon three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.”

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One of the most curious ongoing piracy cases in the world right now involves popular YouTuber Bill Omar Carrasquillo, aka OMI IN A HELLCAT.

In November 2019, the apparently mega-rich founder of pirate IPTV service Gears TV and Gears Reloaded took to YouTube to declare that he’d been raided by FBI and IRS agents who took pretty much everything he had.

A fleet of supercars and at least $5m in funds from his bank accounts were among the haul, he claimed, assertions that he later repeated in several YouTube videos and even a TV interview with CBS News.

But while most people involved in copyright and tax evasion matters tend to remain tight-lipped while their cases are ongoing, Carrasquillo is taking the opposite approach. For reasons best known to him, he’s talking about his problems and history every week, giving additional details that previously hadn’t been in the public eye.

An interview with fellow YouTube channel ‘Say Cheese TV‘ this week has only poured more fuel on the fire, with Carrasquillo revealing that he got into piracy after an unpleasant experience that ended his previously-rumored drug-dealing days.

“I got into this little altercation where I got robbed. That’s the last time I ever sold drugs, on July 4, 2014. I and I said ‘you know what, fuck this’, I ain’t never gonna sell drugs again,” he said.

After this experience, OMI said he went through a few weeks of depression but then a couple of months later a thought popped into his head as a way to make money – Firestick.

“Once that Firestick popped in my head I was like, ‘You know what, I was broke before and I sold DVDs’,” he said.

Noting that the plastic discs are now more or less obsolete, he says he wanted to find a way to deliver content to people digitally – while making some money of course.

“I gotta find a way to put digital movies onto a stick and that’s how it started. Back when Kodi was poppin’ I was one of the first ones doing Kodi sticks and that’s how I started making a lot of money. Buying these boxes from Amazon already pre-loaded and just re-selling them for more money. I’d buy them for $50 and sell them for $120-$150 and that’s how it started,” he told Say Cheese.

At the time OMI says he had 10-15 ‘bands’ ($10-$15,000) put aside in savings but the Firestick business gained traction and quickly brought in a lot more money.

“I first called my brother I said, ‘You know, I’m making five bands [$5,000] a week. And he said, ‘You ain’t making no five bands a week’. I said ‘I swear to God, off these Firestick things’.”

Then according to Carrasquillo, the business began to skyrocket.

“Two months later I’m making $15,000, then a month later – three months later, I’m making $30,000 a week, then $40,000 a week, then $100,000 a week. Damn, $200,000 a week, $300,000 a week, $400,000 a week. I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?”

After just 12 months the big milestone was reached.

“I became a millionaire after a year,” OMI said. “I did good, made a couple of million. But 2017 to 2018? My God.”

What’s important to note here is that OMI says he didn’t get rich by selling Firesticks to individuals, one by one, piece by piece. The business of selling pre-loaded sticks was only a prelude to his major cash generator – the launch of his own pirate IPTV service.

“What happened was I made these apps, I made an app called Gears TV. If you ever watched anything with a Gears TV app on it, that was mine. The app sold for about a year and a half, two years ago,” he said.

“So I’m living my regular life. Now I’m making a couple of hundred ‘bands’ [$200k] every day, every other day. I don’t want to get into specific details about how much money I’m making because I’m still fighting this case. But I’m seeing [millions]. Like too many millions.”

The key is that OMI wasn’t making millions simply from selling an app. He doesn’t go into huge detail during his interviews but it’s clear that the users of the Gears app also required a recurring subscription, which meant that money was coming in all the time through resellers of the service.

“They’re buying but these people that I sold the app to still have to pay me my bread. So everything they’re making off that app, they got to fork it over. Cos I was selling the app for 40 ‘M’s….to a couple of people….to a group.”

By any standard, the amounts being discussed here are considerable, especially in the light of a supposed ongoing copyright infringement and tax evasion investigation. But of course, there will still be people out there thinking they’d like a piece of that action, a point not lost on Say Cheese who asked if Carrasquillo had any tips for fans thinking of starting up a similar service.

“Listen, what I did – it takes hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure to do what I did. I started with the slow grind and I got to where I got to. But trust me, where we was at in 2014, 2015, 2016, you would never get to that point now,” he responded.

“The Feds are trying to cut down every streaming app – and streaming ain’t illegal. Illegal was the movies. You can’t host movies, that’s the illegal part. That’s why I think they’re having such a hard time with this case, it’s because I wasn’t fucking with movies. It was a straight streaming app, I wasn’t stealing channels, I was paying for my cable boxes, I was paying for my cable service.

“And that’s why I’m so comfortable talking about it. They know. They took all the cable boxes out of all my houses that they hit, they took all the video encoders. Encoders are like capture cards. I basically made a Twitch network, private, with all channels for $10-$15 per month. I had a ton of subscribers, I don’t want to talk about how many subscribers I had, it’s up to them [the FBI/IRS] to figure it out.”

OMI also revealed that during a recent flight back from the Dominican Republic, the Feds were actually on the plane with him. He said he was joking around but in one of his videos there was an agent sitting next to him “the whole time.”

But despite having “pretty much everything” taken from him in November, Carrasquillo can be seen ‘buying’ yet more new cars in his latest YouTube videos. This, he says, is a result of the revenue he’s generating from his YouTube content, which he claims is currently around $50,000 per month – with a potential for more.

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Every year movie screeners are sent out to industry insiders who cast their votes for the Oscars and other awards.

While these releases are generally well-protected, several titles still manage to leak online. In recent years, piracy group Hive-CM8 has been the source of most of these leaks. It has been no different this time around.

The first two screeners that were released – ‘Uncut Gems‘ and ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ – were released by rival group EVO. After that, however, Hive-CM8 joined in with several screener copies. The group also made it clear that it was still looking for more sources, specifically requesting ‘Frozen 2’ and ‘Star Wars.’

This request was answered, at least in part, because the group’s first release of the new year is a screener of Frozen 2. In fact, the leaked Frozen 2 screener is branded as “the happy new year’s release.”

“The happy new year’s release is here! for all kids and everyone who loves it too, have fun guys,” Hive-CM8 writes in its release notes.

This is a rather significant leak that will trigger millions of downloads. While it may please many pirates, Disney will not be happy. The movie is still playing in theaters and the official digital release is still months away.

Frozen.2.2019.DVDScr.XVID.AC3.HQ.Hive-CM8

Hive-CM8 previously promised to play nice with Hollywood. That means not releasing films too early. However, the group notes that Frozen 2 has already “played in the budget” which means that it is “ready to go.”

Fair game or not, the pirate group stresses that the quality of screeners is nothing compared to that of the big screen. Those who want to have the best experience are better off going to their local movie theater.

“Please keep in mind a Screener does not represent the Video and Audio quality the Producers intend to show, so please support your local cinemas for the full Experience,” Hive-CM8 writes.

At the time of writing, seven screeners have leaked this season. This means that, at this rate, last year’s all-time low of eight leaks will be easily exceeded. In any case, Hive-CM8 doesn’t plan to stop yet and is calling for more sources in its release notes.

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