Before Netflix, pirates roamed free on the internet.
You could stream what you wanted, when you wanted – totally illegally, of course. It was like the Wild West.
But legitimate streaming sites fought back against the online piracy, offering high quality films, TV shows and documentaries like Breaking Bad and Fargo, available on-demand for a monthly fee.
With around 70 million people using Netlflix worldwide now and the company is now worth a cool £32.9bn, you could be forgiven for thinking illegal streaming was on the wane.
That’s what makes it all the more unbelievable that now Netflix has been accused of illegally streaming one of the greatest films of all time.
A lawsuit has been filed against the company for allegedly streaming classic 1948 film ‘Bicycle Thieves’ without copyright, the Guardian report.
If you’ve never seen the black and white Italian film, it features in most critics’ Top 100 films – and has its place among the great on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.
While Vittorio De Sica’s classic tale of poverty-stricken Rome is in the public domain in the US, Corinth Films claim the subtitled version, reportedly screened on Netflix previously, is not – and remains under copyright.
The company is seeking damages for copyright infringement, but Netflix has yet to comment on the claims.
