Slashdot Mirror
Movie Studio Sues Individual Popcorn Time Users For Infringement
An anonymous reader writes with another story about Popcorn Time, after yesterday's report that two Danes were arrested for sharing information about how to use it. From the article at BGR:
Often described as 'Netflix for pirates,' Popcorn Time users are now being targeted for infringement. The makers of a film called The Cobbler recently initiated a lawsuit against 11 Popcorn Time users in Oregon for copying and distributing the aforementioned film without authorization. The Cobbler, in case you're unfamiliar, stars Adam Sandler and was released in early 2015 to tepid reviews.
"Tepid" is putting it nicely.
On a purely legal basis, it's no different at all, it's still piracy.
But it IS different.
Napster was a method of sharing on a 1 to 1 basis, you find my listing, download directly from me. You are downloading a copy of whatever mp3 it is.
Popcorn time uses bittorrent as the backend, meaning they provide the application, that's it. People in the torrent swarms are the ones committing piracy. Popcorn time makes it pretty simple and easy and looks much like netflix.
The key difference is you are streaming. Without jumping through some hoops, if you stream a popcorntime movie, you don't have a digital copy after you are done. But you have indeed downloaded it, and shared it with any peers in the swarm.
Popcorntime, well the first iteration, i have no trust for this one, doesn't even run the trackers, they simply find content on public trackers and point you to them. It's a merger of bittorrent and traditional streaming that changes the playing field considerably. With caveats, old barely seeded content will not stream well without long delays. As well, since you are a peer in a swarm with NO CONTROL over your torrent client, you can't really cap your download or uploads to reasonable levels.
There's no argument possible to say this isn't illegal, it's 100% illegal. The application has no legitimate purpose, and in fact provides torrent links via their content selection, it's no different that running a tracker in a sense, but when you see that it's devoted to illegal content, the devs aren't in the clear and neither are the users.
This is a honeypot and I would never let my ip into any of those swarms.