Various discussions here over the years on how it's legal to download here .. But not to share.. etc ..

First time I've seen a bust being publicised ..

Big studios looking here too .. Be careful out there..

Is it the difference between the odd download and making money off the sale of streaming devices? Will the owners of the devices face any issues?

We continue to pay taxes on storage devices, including hard drives on our PCs. Until they remove these I am going to continue to download and record, for my own personal use, digital media of all types.

that's a massive business venture with 20'000 dodgy boxes out there bypassing encryption and circumventing the DRM.

I would expect that it's similar to the Kodi stuff that the 5-0 are pouncing on in the UK.

As i understand it .. it's about a device called a Kbox which is just a dumb (and legal) android box.. Somebody configured a bunch of them to connect to an existing IPTV service and sold them as a ready to go streaming service, marketing them on facebook and even selling them in some corner shops in VD.

So pretty blatant .. I don't think the casual streamer is at risk and probably not either the consumers of the kbox .. They'll just have a little useless box now.

TBH I thought my incredibly high cost of SERAFE was covering all my (illegal or not) usage...

Still legal to download for personal use...



The bust was of people who were creating and selling boxes (akin to uploading, but in this case, making equipment for sharing). Based on your article, they made about 2mio CHF from this venture....

For me the interest in downloading mostly stopped when spotify came out .. Why waste my time with downloads and storage when i can stream and even save for just over 10 bucks per month, or whatever it was back then.
I almost immediately sold my huge collection of dusty plastic discs and freed up hundreds of gigs of storage..

Same for modern day.. Kids have Disney plus and Netflix, we have Swisscom and Apple.. The main thing that annoys me now and leads me to illegal streaming is geoblocking, stuff released in the USA that's not legally available here, I'll download that or stream it over IPTV.

I stopped downloading mp3's when I moved to spotify... unlike you though I didn't sell my CDs and now will probably end up throwing them away as no-one wants them...


Geoblocking is the main reason I download, as well as simplicity... with showrss you can download something and push it straight to a NAS which serves it to all the TVs in the house, as well as your mobile for watching on the train...


Also some shows aren't on netflix; and amazon prime tv geoblocks everything (and is a pain when it comes to VPNs and smart DNS)...

That sounds identical to the Kodi boxes being sold in UK which have now been stomped on by the police big time on Ebay and other places where sold pre-configured with all the big movie/sports channels included.

Nothing to still stop you getting a fire stick/android box and sideloading Kodi on and doing it yourself if you can be bothered though.

SSL encryption and usenet alongside a VPN is probably still by far anyone's safest way of downloading media for 'personal' use should they wish to do it. They had a massive bust on the NZB sites which were indexing all the usenet stuff too a few years ago but many are still around.

Here's the updated info on the law in Switzerland with the main paragraph being:

It does not, however, penalise consumers who illegally download films or music for private use on “peer-to-peer” sharing sites.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/downloa...ntent/45305402

We were using a KODI box for a long time (still have it if anyone wants it) but now with a combo of a downloads from PirateBay (using Nord VPN) & a Netflix subscription find we can get more or less everything we need....