I won’t divulge his name or even the country where he operates from, but yesterday HE spoke to a real-life, honest-to-God streaming pirate.

I was poking around about the pirating of Fast Charlie and the apparent inability or unwillingness on the part of Vertical Entertainment to do very much about it.

I’d been told that Vertical’s communications with pirates basically boils down to AI threats and warnings. Pirates don’t listen because AI threats are bullshit. So I asked this guy…call him Long John Silver…about who, if anyone, he might actually be afraid of? Who does he take seriously?

Long John Silver: “We don’t know much about Vertical. We know Muso and other similar services, and we know that they use AI for notices but (a) they don’t follow up, and (b) what can they do when our servers are in countries they have no control over? Servers change so much, and it’s not worth it for them to chase one or two movies.

“Plus takedown notices only come when we host on services such as Dropbox or Google drive. They’re not effective when chasing torrents.

“Why should we take companies like Vertical or anyone else seriously? It’s been 25 years and they haven’t done anything. They can’t do a thing if they don’t know who/where we are.

“If it’s a genuine movie or a fake movie pretending to be real, we still earn from ads. You might find it interesting that when fakes are floating around, real movies get downloaded much less.”