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.

Comments

is there no mercy??

[nimbius]

stars Adam Sandler

You sadistic bastards...as if an Adam Sandler film isnt a punishment unto itself.

Re:is there no mercy??

[sacrilicious]

Given that it stars Sandler, I propose that it should have been called The Gock Cobbler.

Re:is there no mercy??

[Fire_Wraith]

If anything, the movie studios should owe money to the viewers for having had to watch that.

The New Napster

[wiggles]

How is this Popcorn Time app any different than Napster? Easy and professional looking it may be - legal, it isn't, and right or wrong, the users are liable. The news here isn't that the users got busted, it's why it took so long.

Re:The New Napster

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The New Napster

[Travis Mansbridge]

Are you kidding? Popcorn Time has been well known for a while, though its heyday was last year before the original version came down under MPAA pressure.

Re:The New Napster

[o_ferguson]

I have an argument that says it isn't illegal: I live in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize the legitimacy of copyright law.

Always figured it was a honeypot

[Nyder]

I don't know about anyone else, but Popcorn Time seems like a trap to me. Make a program that using bit torrent to share the movies between it's users. Let it run for a few years. Start testing the waters will a small lawsuit against a few users. If that succeeds, then use the info you gathered over the last few years to bring a lot of lawsuits against a lot of people.

Re:Always figured it was a honeypot

[edtice1559]

I'm not familiar enough with the Supreme court case with regard to Laches to make a very nuanced legal argument. (IANAL, et cetera). However, I'm not surprised as it seems very similar to "bait cars" that police departments use to catch car thieves. In many large organizations people arrive at 09:00 and leave at 5:00pm or so. Car thieves would know that they could come to the parking lot around 10:30, steal a car, and nobody would be the wiser until the end of the work day. So police departments would put commonly-stolen vehicles in the lot with GPS trackers. When the car got stolen, it was easy to catch the thieves. Defense attorneys tried to make the Laches argument and failed for the same reason they probably would here. The person set out to steal a car. The fact that they go the bait car didn't change the fact that they, well, stole a car. Sure the car was *intended* to be stolen (for purposes of catching thieves) but that line of reasoning was absurd. If I set out to engage in retail piracy and it turns out that the copyright owners happen to have mixed some of their bait in with the goods I'm casing, doesn't change the fact that I set out to commit the crime and just happened to get bait instead of the real thing. Now if they actively *encouraged* the piracy, that might be different. That would be entrapment by the police and may invoke Laches in civil cases. But the fact that you got caught in a sting while committing a crime doesn't make you any less guilty.

Defendants have a clear defense...

[sconeu]

Anyone who deliberately downloads an Adam Sandler movie is obviously insane.

Re:Defendants have a clear defense...

[CanadianMacFan]

Yes, but then so is the movie company for making an Adam Sandler movie in the first place.

Re:Defendants have a clear defense...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Not this one. It's had 5 figure box office take it's first weekend. Low 5 figures. I never even heard of the Cobbler other than the bad reviews and lack of ticket sales. I never heard of Men Women and Children til I googled this. Pixels radically underperformed. I'd rather see the Pixels short on youtube over and over than the Sandler movie.

Cobbler did inspire a great quote tho:

So I just saw 'The Cobbler' and all I can assume is that Adam Sandler got tired of everyone saying 'Little Nicky' was his worst movie.

— Stephen Whitty (@StephenWhitty) March 3, 2015

Re:Defendants have a clear defense...

[sims 2]

Reminds me of the time I discovered that lemonade tycoon would let you sell empty cups.

They didn't sell very well but it was profitable enough that you could buy anything in the game in under the 1 hour trial.

Re:Defendants have a clear defense...

[jedidiah]

Now you're the one posting nonsense. Cinemas don't get anywhere near 40% of the gross. That's why they have to sell those annoying overpriced concessions. With some big films they may see NONE of the initial ticket proceeds.

Although promotion is something else that's not included in the production budget. It's another important factor to consider in terms of "profitability". Although your numbers horribly wrong.

The New Business Model

[Hydrian]

1. Release shitty movie.
2.Somebody illegally downloads it to see how bad it is. (because no movie theater will show it)
3. Sue the downloader!
4. Profit!

Re:The New Business Model

[meta-monkey]

The Producers 2.

Fines should be like banks

[tekrat]

When a big Bank breaks the law, they are fined a tiny percentage of the money they made breaking the law. If a Bank makes $500 million illegally, their fine comes out to something like $20 million.

If corporations are people, it should work the other way as well. Therefore, if someone downloads a movie they would have otherwise paid $14 to see in a theater, the fine should be about 2 bucks.

The only reason fines are so huge for file sharers is because every company thinks that whatever crap it is that they "own" (i.e. "intellectual property") is always worth millions or billions, but it's not. Hell, CEOs probably take a dump in the executive crapper and think it's worth billions.

I recently had a fire, and lost plenty of property, both real and intellectual. Do you think the insurance company compensated me for millions or billions?

Why are things held to one standard for large corporations, while ignoring people? Why are rights several curtailed for actual people? Why is property move valuable than life?

Re:Fines should be like banks

[Theaetetus]

When a big Bank breaks the law, they are fined a tiny percentage of the money they made breaking the law. If a Bank makes $500 million illegally, their fine comes out to something like $20 million.

If corporations are people, it should work the other way as well. Therefore, if someone downloads a movie they would have otherwise paid $14 to see in a theater, the fine should be about 2 bucks.

That makes perfect sense. And by the same logic, if someone uploads or shares a movie that a distributor would have paid between $10-20 million for the rights to distribute, the fine should be about $50-150k.

It's important to remember that people aren't being sued for downloading, they're being sued for uploading. And distribution rights are expensive. Apple doesn't pay Warner Brothers $1, once, in exchange for being able to distribute some new song. AMC Theaters doesn't give New Line Cinemas a simple $14 for the rights to show Straight Outta Compton on a thousand screens for the next three months.

Remember back when Michael Jackson bought the distribution rights to the Beatles' catalog for several million? It worked out to around $20-30k per song... which happens to be right about the same amount Jammie Thomas and Joel Tenenbaum had to pay for their infringement.

Sandler's company rather aggressive?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

So there's this, and them blindly going after anything named Pixels any place and specifically on Youtube. Sandler's movies are doing bad enough recently, Do you really want him hated for over-aggressive Rights/Restrictions management? Whatever you think of the piracy around Metallica, their popularity really fell off the map once they lost their fans from what some felt was over-aggressive policing.

Re:Warning

[kthreadd]

What's sane about allowing large-scale copyright infringement?

Re:Warning

[hackwrench]

It isn't copyright infringement if the laws of another country has passed a law saying it isn't and you happen to be in that country.

Re:Warning

[Cederic]

Allowing large-scale copyright infringement.

What's sane about current copyright laws?

Re:let's see 10 years a moive you can get less tim

[amiga3D]

They could get less time for killing the CEO of the company responsible for the shitty movie. Especially if they beat him to death with a chair or something instead of using a gun. Time off if they record the murder and post in on youtube.