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UK High Court Orders Block On Popcorn Time
An anonymous reader writes: Five ISPs have been given orders by the UK High Court to restrict access to sites offering downloads of popular movie streaming service Popcorn Time – a move which follows complaints from the Motion Picture Association referring to the software's use as a platform for viewing pirated content. According to the new regulation, Virgin, BT, Sky, EE and TalkTalk are now required to block access to popcorntime.io, flixtor.me, popcorntime.se and isoplex.isohunt.to – all sites which link to Popcorn Time downloads. In the High Court order, Justice Birss cites under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, that the 'Popcorn Time application is used in order to watch pirated content on the internet.' Popcorn Time operates as a BitTorrent client, despite its slick user interface, and is used mainly for illegal content – although, as its supporters argue, it is also a handy tool for streaming public domain films. It is unclear how successful the ban will be – the blocked sites are not the only places to find Popcorn Time online. Additionally, at ISP level, it will be challenging to monitor as there is not a single version or developer to seek out, with the code available as open source.
Euroskeptic views SHOULD be suppressed. Anyone opposed to the EU should be arrested and silenced. People don't know how good they have it. I'd take prosperity and safety over "freedom" anytime. And so should you. If you're not smart enough to know what's good for you, let better people decide it and shut up.
I hadn't heard of Popcorn Time until very recently, although I'm living in Thailand and my standard means of obtaining digital media of any sort is piracy.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to use uTorrent or Deluge plus eztv.ch, yts.to, kickass.to, and/or the Pirate Bay to get just about anything that I want. From very old TV series to brand new movies (sometime BEFORE theatrical release) to PC games to eBooks, I almost never get a desire to search for something and then fail to find it.
BUT, Popcorn Time puts that (at least the TV and movies aspects) into an interface that my mother or grandmother could easily use. I would recommend it to my family and/or remote desktop install it for them, but they live in the US so threatening letters from ISPs (and worse) seem like more of a risk than they are here in piracy hotspot SE Asia. A VPN or other solution might take care of those concerns, but on the other hand it would also detract from the ease of use, which is the main attraction of Popcorn Time.
If you're savvy enough to know and manage those risks (or if you live in a place where they aren't a concern), Popcorn Time is well worth checking out. Just a couple caveats: .io one is 100% clean in my experience, but I hear the others have adware/malware.
* Go for popcorntime.io, not the other fork (popcorn-time.se or "Time4Popcorn"). The
* Biggest downside of Popcorn Time in my opinion is that it has no option to seed beyond the duration of the time that you are streaming/watching the videos. I'd happily designate a 1-2TB drive or partition to Popcorn Time / torrent cache and allow PT to seed up to a target ratio or beyond if I'm a critical seeder of the file. I set up PT to keep its cache persistent so I can let uTorrent manage the seeding, but it is a by-hand multi step process to import PT stuff into uTorrent because PT puts everything into subfolders created with the filename of the torrents it downloads (which are a long hash of alphanumeric characters). If PT streamlines that process or just implements better seeding, I'll switch to it as my primary means of video torrenting.
I, like many others, had not heard of Popcorn Time before it was so successfully advertised by the British Legal system. I now wonder where the source code is hosted, and under which open source licence.
It's reputation is Netflix for pirates.
It's great, slick, intuitive interface, great selection of mostly good quality torrents.
It is so slick I would wager a lot of users have no idea it is basically a bitorrent client that downloads a copy of the movie to your HDD and shares it. It looks very professional. It looks like a Netflix variation, much like my smart TVs and Bluray players all have a different Netflix interface. It has a logo that looks polished and very commercial. Their forums are a disaster for trying to find information when something doesn't work right. Earlier in the year they changed cover providers and the temporary bugfix was posted in a comment (not stickied or prominent in any way) and was a bitch to find as it wasn't repeated in any other thread on the topic.
It looks legitimate enough that at least two people I know were astounded when they found out they were 'gasp!' pirating movies 'gasp!' I work on most of my friends computers although I don't work in the industry.
I occasionally find a specific file that just won't work properly or dies in the middle, but it mostly just works.
Series updates can be spotty, Some shows can be weeks behind but others seem to update within hours of broadcast.
A quick mention when you open it that it may not comply with laws in your region that nobody seems to notice. It's great for stuff that isn't on Netflix.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable