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Inside Popcorn Time – the world's fastest growing piracy site

• talleyrand 11y ago
  "Creators and makers should have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed." This is a debatable proposition.
  • cm2187 11y ago
    Why wouldn't they? Even open source software comes with a license that restricts exactly that.
    • dagw 11y ago
      There's a greater good argument to be made that people shouldn't be denied access to education and culture simply based on the country they live in or how much money they have.
      • cm2187 11y ago
        But in all western countries that does not invalidate copyrights. And in this particular case, I am not sure Games of Thrones qualifies as "education and culture".
        • krapht 11y ago
          It definitely counts as culture. Today's literature was yesterday's mass market serial.
        • thanksgiving 11y ago
          While I agree that you are correct under current laws the position as I see it is about it should be fully legal to copy any publicly published piece of information. I am not too worried that literature and art will go away. Literature and art existed before we had avenues for mass audience to buy or rent personal copies and they will continue to exist after we dismantle copyright. I'd like to note that I support trademarks. I do not condone people selling modified versions of Microsoft Windows including keyloggers that call home to the seller and claiminf it is official, unmodified Windows. One shouldn't sell malware with someone else's trademark on it. The problem as fsf explains well is that we have grouped disparate things together under vague intellectual property when the entire exercise is anything but intellectual.
        • ionised 11y ago
          It fits the very definition of culture.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • s73v3r 11y ago
        If that's true, then the government should be paying these people to produce the content. Otherwise you're saying that poor people are entitled to content for free, without the creator getting anything.
    • digi_owl 11y ago
      Except that they use it in a kind of legal judo move, making sure anyone getting it from you get the same rights as you got it under. Never mind that there are a bunch of companies, in particular in the embedded market, that violate it left and right.
    • icebraining 11y ago
      For me, open source restrictions are merely a consolation prize. I'd gladly give them up tomorrow along with the rest of copyright.
      • jordigh 11y ago
        Without the restrictions of the GPL we might not have OpenWrt, many Linux modules, or near universal hardware support for gcc. If we can find a way to ensure we can get those without copyleft, alright, but so far copyright is the only legal tool we have.
        • desdiv 11y ago
          So the penalty is just having to switch to *BSD and LLVM?
  • bonesmoses 11y ago
    Indeed it is. Legit avenues like Netflix and iTunes are showing people are willing to pay for content, so long as it's available. There's dwindling tolerance for manufactured scarcity. Make it available, and we'll buy it. Don't, and it'll be pirated. That's just how things work.
    • Numberwang 11y ago
      And if I need Netflix for some tv, HBO for some, Hulu for some, iPlayer for some, Canal+ for some and torrent sites to access Korean thrillers.... I'm going to go 100% torrent sites.
      • sixothree 11y ago
        I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and one of the most expensive DirecTV packages. Yet I still torrent most of my television. Yes the very same television I can get from satellite I download via internet. For some reason I just find the (watching) experience so much cleaner and easier.
        • pavel_lishin 11y ago
          Rewinding/fast forwarding is easier; so are subtitles. It works on the subway, and on airplanes. It works when my neighbors are saturating the local bandwidth.
        • Vexs 11y ago
          It's because it's so damn convenient. No dicking about with ads, settings, codes, authentication, drm, whatever. Just look, download, and go. Usually higher res too.
        • ionised 11y ago
          I've got UK Netflix and have found myself torrenting some movies because the Netflix version was not HD due to some stupid licensing arrangement. This has happened on maybe 6 or 7 movies in the last year and I'm starting to get annoyed enough to consider cancelling my subscription. The pickings are not very good anymore and new stuff seems so sparse and infrequent. I'm spending money each month on something i use maybe one or two nights a month.
  • pdabbadabba 11y ago
    > This is a debatable proposition. True enough. Though for the present purposes, it it probably sufficient to note that this reformulation is not fairly debatable: "Creators and makers have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed." Edit: Actually, krapht's response led me to see that this is completely wrong. "Creators and makers" have robust (though not totally unlimited) legal rights to determine the conditions under which their works are copied, but do not have an all encompassing and well established legal right to determine how their works are distributed after the first sale. Of course, the easy confusion (that I fell prey to) is that distribution often, but not always, entails copying. When it does, creators have strong legal rights. But when it does not, their rights are considerably more limited. The example of libraries brings this distinction out nicely.
    • krapht 11y ago
      Public libraries being the notable exception.
    • JulianMorrison 11y ago
      Yes it is, because it smuggles in a definition of "own" that a whole lot of people don't agree with.
      • pdabbadabba 11y ago
        Again, it is true that a lot of people disagree with it from a normative perspective. But not a lot of people disagree that this form of ownership does actually exist under our current system of laws, descriptively. At most, one might disagree with the use of the word "own," but this disagreement is fairly meaningless when discussing what rights do and do not exist, since the bundle of rights referred to by the word "own" is well defined regardless of the label used.
        • JulianMorrison 11y ago
          If you want "own" to be synonymous with a bundle of statutory rights having nothing necessarily to do with the normal English language definition or emotional impact of "owning" something, why didn't you call it "gleeb" or "fnarg" instead? I do in fact disagree with using "own" because I consider it to be smuggling in connotations under cover of a claim to precision which is unlikely to be adhered to - the user will then pivot to words like "steal" or "pirate" and smuggle in a shedload more connotations, and soon will be talking about copying a pattern as if were equivalent to hotwiring your car.
  • gozo 11y ago
    Somewhat weird statement considering the MPAA is representing the studios and not the creators and, eh, makers.
    • digi_owl 11y ago
      Its called PR.
  • IBM 11y ago
    It's only really debatable on reddit, HN, Slashdot, etc.
    • ctolsen 11y ago
      It really isn't. Copyright is riddled with exceptions of many kinds, and the granting of it is completely in the hands of whatever a government wants to provide.
    • jfindley 11y ago
      I'm not sure that's true. While I'm not a fan of the entitlement-culture that's a massive feature of large parts of the popular internet, there's more to this than simple entitlement. Demanding content for free is entitlement. Being happy to pay for content, but being denied access based on your geographical location isn't entitlement - at least to me, and I think to a lot of people both on and off the internet. What content owners have seemed to fail to grasp, repeatedly, is that governments operate at least partly by consent[0]. No matter how successful you are at convincing the government of a country to pass the law you want, if it's a law that's very difficult to enforce and is generally perceived as being unfair/unreasonable, it will often get ignored entirely. The problem in this particular case is that in much of the world, the content owners have taken an incredibly aggressive stance, making it extremely difficult or impossible to access lots of content legally. This is often regarded as unfair by the general population of that country - "Why can't I listen to this song/watch this film? It's been available in <other country> for months/years". From a legal standpoint, the content owner is within their rights to say: "Actually, I don't really care about country Y. I'll not bother releasing my content there."[1] However, in practice, it's unlikely their wishes will be respected. No matter how you or they might feel about it, in the real world, content owners have two options: 1) Make it legally available under reasonable terms. 2) Accept that it will be available illegally. There is no third option. 0: Yes, there's debate as to what degree this applies, but for the purposes of my point that shouldn't matter, as long as you accept that there's at least some degree of consent required. 1: In theoretical discussions of this topic, it's often presumed that market forces will counteract this, and incentivise the owner to make their content widely available in most markets - this is demonstrably not the case in practice however.
  • Jun8 11y ago
    Absolutely! First, let's agree that "creators and makers" in this particular sense mostly refers to big studios, i.e. large corporates, not just to up and coming indie bands or filmmakers. So let's rephrase the statement as "corporations should have the right to determine how and where the [patented] work they own is distributed". It's then easy to see that the above does not hold true in all cases, many examples of public greater good can be provided but the case of generic drugs is perhaps the most well-known: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694898.
  • s73v3r 11y ago
    Not really. Unless you feel entitled to the work of others.
    • Fargren 11y ago
      Copies of the work of other are not the same as the work of others. That is one of the reasons why the argument is debatable.
      • digi_owl 11y ago
        Yep. If one consider modern machine tools, I could in theory buy a chair, you could take proper measurements of it, and then feed those into a CNC or 3D printer to get an exact duplicate. The only one at a potential loss here would be something like IKEA, because you didn't buy the chair from them. And that is the kind of insane territory the likes of TPP and TTIP are heading into with their clauses whereby companies can sue nations for loss of potential profits (due to new legislations or whatsnot).
      • s73v3r 11y ago
        You're still benefiting from their work and effort. There's far more to a work than simply the cost to reproduce. That's why it's not debatable.
        • Fargren 11y ago
          I'll ignore that we are debating this(and both getting upvotes), and thus it's debatable. For most of human history if you, say, heard a poem someone else wrote you were absolutely free to copy it, reproduce it, even sell it! Even if you didn't do the work of actually writing it. And this was the norm, and no one thought the author should have the right to stop you. So saying that it's not debatable whether this is still the case from a moral standpoint (hence the "should" in the debated statement) seems to me shortsighted. What's more, even today there are countless ways in which content is distributed without permission from it's makers that we don't deem wrongs. Libraries were named in this thread, and we have all kinds of lendings, readings, quotes and all use that is allowed by fair use. Where the rights of the makers should end (and those of the consumer start) is very much debatable.
  • paulhauggis 11y ago
    Its not really debatable in the tech community. See: the gnu license.
  • digi_owl 11y ago
    As best i can tell (not a copyright scholar) that is a generalized version of the French "rights of the author". While the English copyright only dealt with, well, copying, the French system dealt with things like how and when a play or musical piece could be performed. This because they cared not just about the monetary angle, but about the reputation of the creator (like say if a politician the creator didn't support wanted to use a song or similar). The reason we see this pop up is that copyright was standardized across Europe with the Bern Convention. Later this was extended across the world (USA didn't sign on until the 1980s, btw). The french is also to thank for the whole "life+X" copyright duration...
    • angersock 11y ago
      It's a cute and anachronistic practice. Unfortunately, it seems to have in mind some ministrel or author scraping-by in poverty instead of the more likely modern publishing/licensing corporation.
      • digi_owl 11y ago
        And that was the case when it was put in place. When copyright first came to be, it was a negotiating leverage between the singular author and the owners of printing presses (very mechanical and labor intensive to operate, and therefore it was rarely done without sales in mind) for a share of the profits. Without it, it was not uncommon for a printer to buy a text for pennies and then resell copies for pounds. Then again, it also introduced the title page holding the name of author and printer. Thus the government had names to lean on if the content was not acceptable...
    • Vespasian 11y ago
      Quite some civil law countries in europe have this system. For example "droit d'auteur" in france, "derechos de autor" in spain and "Urheberrecht" in germany both named not after the work or the act (to copy it) but after the author.
      • digi_owl 11y ago
  • egypturnash 11y ago
    Okay. What do you make? What do you make to pay the bills; what do you make for passion? How would you feel about people pirating what you make to pay the bills? Even if you are 100% open source everything for free forever, do you acknowledge that other people may be looking to their creative work as a source of income, and may want a more restrictive license on their work? Do you feel they are morally wrong to ever want to be paid for all the time and labor that goes into performing their craft, and probably into paying off their absurd student loans as well?
    • icebraining 11y ago
      We all want legal privileges, nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't mean society should grant them. "I want" is not an argument. If people can't live off of doing some activity, they have to choose whether they can afford to keep doing it or not. Student loans, and obligations in general that people have contracted with certain expectations, only justify that we take a "softer" approach, it doesn't change the argument.
      • gress 11y ago
        This is a great argument which implicitly favors maximizing privilege for the already rich.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • mdpopescu 11y ago
        Thank you; I got downvoted when I said "I (don't) want" is not an argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9941486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9941486
  • tptacek 11y ago
    If it's debatable when it comes to movies, it's debatable when it comes to software, and we should all be making a lot less money.
    • schoen 11y ago
      I think opposition to proprietary software is as mainstream here as opposition to film copyrights. (Maybe we should have a poll to find out.) (There are plenty of nuances of people's opposition, for example people who think arbitrary copyright licenses should still be enforceable but that it's mean to use a proprietary one.)
    • icebraining 11y ago
      It's a deal!
      • tptacek 11y ago
        I can't imagine how anyone on HN could possibly spend enough on movies or music to make this trade rational.
        • icebraining 11y ago
          I know you all think it is, but it's not a matter of money. All the software I make is already freely distributable by its users, and that was an important reason why I chose this job.
          • tptacek 11y ago
            I think I'll take the many tens of thousands of dollars in premium that intellectual property law allows my work to command in preference to the warm fuzzies I might get at the prospect of Zac Efron's "We Are Your Friends" being free and immediately available on my Macbook, which also would not exist without intellectual property law.
            • 11y ago
  • 6stringmerc 11y ago
    Not really. Is there room to debate the notion of artificial scarcity and copyright limits? Sure. Does a creator of a work sacrifice all rights to distribution simply by the act of creation? Nope. Or, in a more real-world example, if I found out a religious organization was using one of my original works as a soundtrack to a commercial - without my consent or receiving compensation - I'm going to fight to keep my rights to tell them to shut it down. The implication of your statement is much more problematic.
  • superuser2 11y ago
    If you oppose copyright, you are required to oppose Free Software. "Creators and makers should have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed" is the only reason copyleft licenses have any power. You do not get to be a copyright abolitionist and a supporter of mandatory source code distribution at the same time. There seems to be a lot of overlap between these communities, and the cognitive dissonance is just stunning.
    • saint_fiasco 11y ago
      I think you missed the point of Free Software entirely. The GPL, like the Discordian Kopyleft, is a legal exploit, or a hack if you prefer, that uses a silly IP law to nullify itself. If some people are using IP law to restrict the freedom of users and makers of software, why can't they use the law to defend themselves? It's like complaining that anarchists are hypocrites for calling the police when they are victims of crime.
      • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        I was with you until the horrible example. Of course Anarchists are hypocrites. (They would be the first to go in a general breakdown of society.)
        • saint_fiasco 11y ago
          An anarchist explained to me that if they are forced to pay taxes and follow laws and all that, they should at least enjoy the advantages, even if they would prefer to forego those advantages if they were then free from taxes and laws. Much like a significant minority of Free Software advocates (notably not Stallman) believe that the ideal is to have no IP at all, but that since we have them whether we want them or not, Free Software and Kopyleft are a valid defense mechanism.
          • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
            ...and in that sense they act hypocritically. Its a fair cop. The Anarchist claim is nonsense. They want no government, because it would be better. Yet when they get a free chance to act out that scenario (taking care of things on their own) still they call on the man. In what way would it hurt them to NOT call the cops after they've been mugged? They've already paid the taxes, so no marginal cost. It would let them enjoy the experience of their utopian society with no further cost to them. I call that hypocrisy to the max.
• ghshephard 11y ago
  What's bizarre to me is how casually "non tech" people in Singapore refer to watching stuff on "Popcorn Time."
  • userbinator 11y ago
    Around a decade or more ago, when P2P filesharing was really popular, average "non tech" people were speaking of Kazaa, Limewire, etc. and all the "free stuff" they could get from them.
    • Someone1234 11y ago
      And of course Napster, which was so popular even several movies and TV shows of the period referenced it (e.g. The Italian Job (2003)).
  • zyxley 11y ago
    Why? The whole point of the app is to be as convenient as possible. Heck, it's got better design than services like Netflix or Amazon when it comes to looking through TV shows.
    • seiji 11y ago
      Well, it's like saying people download stuff "from bittorrent." It's like saying you download music from TCP. How people talk: "Where did you get this music?" "Oh, I got it from bittorrent." People aren't nuanced enough to know the difference between an indexing service, an application, a protocol, and various implementations or instances of all combinations thereof.
      • sushid 11y ago
        But there is/was an app called Bittorrent, right? I think that might add to the confusion for the typical layperson.
        • userbinator 11y ago
• jcromartie 11y ago
  It boggles my mind how glossy and polished and professional the site is, and that it gives credit to the people who make it happen, but gives no recognition to the people who make the content that everybody feels entitled to.
  • Karunamon 11y ago
    I think the info pages for every movie on Popcorn Time show the credits and other relevant metadata. So.. yeah, they're getting recognition.
  • api 11y ago
    This is the dead horse I keep beating in these threads. If there were no copyright, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. would all be doing this to artists for massive profit and with their brands front and center. People would actually ask questions like "what, you mean Apple didn't make The Hobbit?" The idea that everyone would just transition to a gift culture and give artists a big hug in a post-copyright world is incredibly naive. Too many people are cheap greedy assholes. It'd be an exploitation-fest for the five seconds it would take for all creative industries to go bankrupt. Then there would be nothing.
    • ska 11y ago
      It might be dead for a good reason. I've heard lots of articulate arguments for reforming the copyright system, and "The idea that everyone would just transition to a gift culture and give artists a big hug ..." has not been part of any of them. At the very least copyright reform and "gift culture" are very distinct ideas.
      • rhino369 11y ago
        I see that argument all the time. They claim they'd just donate to artists they like or use kickstarters to fund big projects. Also, removing copyright isn't really copyright reform.
        • deleted 11y ago
• powertower 11y ago
  > Most of the core team had been operating under false identities, used anonymization tools and been very careful with operational security. > All of a sudden all the developers discovered simultaneously that a lawyer from the film studio Warner Bros. had visited their professional LinkedIn pages. Are there any details about how the Warner Bros. lawyer was able to find the developers? Sounds like a story of it's own, bigger than this one.
  • objclxt 11y ago
    > Sounds like a story of it's own, bigger than this one. I think the key word you're overlooking is "most", as in "most of the core team" took steps to be anonymous, not all (steps that, for all we know, may never have worked).
    • loganu 11y ago
      "Most of the core team" anonymous. "All of the developers" being visited on LinkedIn. If it's not sloppy journalism, there's something really interesting about a multi-national company's legal team using (potentially) illegal means in tracking down developers. "– We do not know how, but he had managed to track us. We were quite unsettled. We thought it was a scare tactic. And we were frightened. None of us were anonymous anymore. They knew where we worked, where we lived."
      • kachnuv_ocasek 11y ago
        There's an adage: “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”
        • dhimes 11y ago
          I think kordless has a key insight here: it doesn't say the lawyers visited all of them and only them. The devs may still be fairly anonymous in a big pool of devs that was visited- a dragnet, as it were. We don't know yet.
• loganu 11y ago
  "I am convinced that the Popcorn Time-killer is going to be a Netflix without borders. They should remove national restrictions for films,..." Does someone have some insight into why Netflix has time and geographic restrictions on content? I can understand, in some cases, publishers not wanting to let their movies or TV out to foreign countries. (Maybe waiting for a marketing push, or a broadcast deal to be reached in a new market/locale) But I can't really wrap my head around movies and shows being phased in and out. (Example: Recently saw that some of the Transformers movies will disappear in a week or two). From a technical standpoint, I can't see the issue being that they can only have a certain number of films view-able. from an economic standpoint, I would think that whenever someone watches a show, a portion of their monthly Netflix fee goes to the creators of that show, so there's always an incentive for the creators to let Netflix show their content.
  • dibujante 11y ago
    In Canada, it's "the law" (not really, but effectively): the CRTC mandates that a certain percentage of all content on Canadian Netflix be Canadian. Since there is simply not much Canadian content on a global scale, Netflix would have to scrape the barrel getting additional licenses in order to "buy" more space for other content. So they don't, and Canadians pretend to be US Americans when they watch Netflix.
    • jeromegv 11y ago
      This is a myth, this CRTC rule is mandated for broadcasters. CRTC does not rule content on the internet. Source: http://blog.fagstein.com/2014/11/10/crtc-tv-myths/ http://blog.fagstein.com/2014/11/10/crtc-tv-myths/
    • loganu 11y ago
      Right, completely forgot about this. I think CanCon is a good idea in theory, but Netflix could buy all the Little Mosque on the Prairie, Trailer Park Boys, and Corner Gas spin-offs that Canada could possibly produce, and it wouldn't make much of a dent in the amount of content that Netflix could push. Edit: Others have pointed out Netflix doesn't fall under CRTC guidelines after "internet tax" was threatened.
• paulhauggis 11y ago
  The only way to win the battle is to get content creators on board. When you make it impossible for them to make a living, they will never agree.
• ErikRogneby 11y ago
  Why have a Terms of Service for what is clearly an illegal site? https://popcorntime.io/tos https://popcorntime.io/tos
  • josu 11y ago
    The site is international and there are many countries where what they are doing is not illegal.
    • ErikRogneby 11y ago
      Here is a map of where it is illegal. (the blue) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#/media/File:Berne_Convention_signatories.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#/media/File:B...
      • josu 11y ago
        Not really. Popcorntime doesn't provide copyrighted material, it just helps access and consume it, same as your laptop, TV, Chromecast or cellphone. Besides, the technology behind Popcorn could be used to access open content, therefore, the Berne Convention doesn't explicitly apply here.
        • ErikRogneby 11y ago
          Helpling access and consume it is called secondary liability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_liability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_liability I expect the case law around this sort of thing will continue to evolve.
        • e12e 11y ago
          I wonder if it'd be difficult to add an index from vodo.net to Popcorn Time. If they also added a link to the pay/donate API, that might actually give some of the Vodo.net-releases some much needed money (given the market share Popcorn Time apparently has).
  • 11y ago
• mpeg 11y ago
  This is a terrible article, full of inaccurate facts. The most blatant of all is that Popcorn Time is not a site, it's an application (which is why it's been so hard to block). It uses existing sites (like YTS and The Piratebay) to find magnet links to content to stream (using a torrent streaming library) Also: "“Mr. Robot” is not available elsewhere, apart from on Popcorn Time." - What the hell? If a series is available on Popcorn Time it's inherently because it's available somewhere else, as they don't host any content But the one that bothers me most is that they mention how before Popcorn Time, piracy involved: "Aggressive advertising banners, websites popping up unexpectedly and strange porn ads". Well, guess what? Popcorn Time is an application that most people download in binary form, so it could steal your personal data, inject advertising in other sites, use your computer as a proxy... etc. It's not a step forward.
  • spikels 11y ago
    Given the context I think they mean that Mr Robot is not available legally in Argentina.
    • mpeg 11y ago
      They make a point of saying it's only available in Popcorn Time though.
  • kordless 11y ago
    The facts in this article are irrelevant. It's an opinion piece, at best, about the nature of humans to spread human related information to each other and the unsavory behaviors of a few humans to try to limit the spread of information. In that regard, you and the movie industry have something in common. You both spread FUD around to get your point across.
    • bduerst 11y ago
      Why are the facts irrelevant, and why is it FUD to point it out?
      • 11y ago
• United857 11y ago
  Napster, Gnutella and friends forced the music industry to adapt their business models to include digital distribution -- and we've learned that consumers are still willing to pay for services that are reasonably priced, DRM-free, and easy to use even with piracy as an alternative. Hopefully Popcorn Time will do the same for movies. Netflix and friends have made great strides -- but they are still hobbled by DRM and geographical restrictions, as the article points out.
• drivingmenuts 11y ago
  Can someone clarify something for me? If I am a movie producer, do I or do I not have the right to release a movie in one region and a month later in another region? Do I have the right to release in one medium first, then some other medium later (or not at all)? Do I have the right to maximize the profit on an optional, non-essential product? Now, the studios say one thing, everyone here seems to be saying another. There's a ton of rhetoric on either side, but no clear-cut answers. (By "here", I mean in general tone, not specifics within this particular thread of conversations.)
  • davidw 11y ago
    They have that right, but that doesn't mean it isn't lame. It goes against an open internet. I'm happy to pay for stuff I like on line, but found it supremely annoying that I couldn't get US shows or movies when I lived in Italy, even with a US credit card and billing address. I ended up signing up for a proxy thing, so on top of paying for content, I had to pay extra just to access it! Realistically, not everyone is going to make that choice. Mostly, Amazon seems to have gotten things right with the Kindle: content is mostly accessible anywhere, and it's very easy to buy, making that the path of least resistance.
    • thirdsun 11y ago
      Music's got it right too - it's a flawless, DRM-free experience to buy an album these days. And I do it a lot (not a fan of streaming, prefer to own my content). Movies however...it couldn't be any less convenient to buy a movie in high quality and original audio/language that can be played in any media player (like Kodi/XBMC). In fact it is legally impossible. Buy and download online? Not possible. The closest option is buying a bluray and ripping it. I'd even consider getting an optical drive (that I absolutely don't need otherwise) to do that, but as a european I'd also have to deal with those unnecessary delays in availability. I'm sorry, but as long as this situation remains, I won't feel sorry about pirating bluray-ripped movies in good quality. On the other hand I can't remember when I last pirated music.
  • a_c_s 11y ago
    I don't see the value in allowing people to discriminate geographically: the artist shouldn't have control over who can purchase their product or consume their work so long as the artist is properly compensated. (Similarly for physical goods: it would be absurd to set up a bookstore but based on people's passports I may or may not sell them books.)
• BatFastard 11y ago
  Seems like this is an idea whose time has come. Once the source is out, how much would it take for a new team to take up the quest? This time they could make sure to create new anonymous identities (how to do this properly?). I don't know the in and outs of such things. Why has the time come? Watching content on the owners web site is a horrible experience. You get the same ad multiple times in a row, OR the volume on one is barely audible, and the next is blowing out the windows. Worse then it ever was on cable or broadcast. From what I hear, popcorn time makes this all go away.
• kordless 11y ago
  > “Creators and makers should have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed. Popcorn Time has no legitimate purpose; it only serves to infringe copyright thereby preventing creators from earning money for their work. The film and TV industry is comprised of hundreds of thousands of men and women working hard behind the scenes to bring the vibrant, creative stories we enjoy to the screen. Content theft undermines that hard work and also negatively impacts the audience’s experience online by often directing them to low-quality versions of movies and shows or sites infected with malware and viruses.” - Stan McCoy, Stan McCoy, President and Managing Director of the MPA in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The initial line of reasoning in this quote is flawed. Creators and makers don't have the right to pre-determine judgement of a particular piece of software or the possible use of that software by users based on some claim to "rights". It's the pre-judging part that is wrong here, not the simulated assertion to ownership of the content in a hypothetical violation. Judging my use of a particular piece of software before I use it is stupid, narrow minded and factually blaming. Would they also limit my use of an operating system to run the software? Or a computer to run the OS? No. Why? Because Apple makes lots of money doing those things. Because this line of reasoning is flawed, it's not a big surprise Stan quickly drops into bias hacking the audience by making arguments that Popcorn Time "negatively impacts audience experience" and contains "malware and viruses". Given the fact they are willing to spread falsehoods is an indication they themselves are in cognitive dissonance over the whole thing. Not that they don't spread falsehoods about their own content all the time to us via commercials, billboards, flyers, ads on websites, reviews, etc., etc. I'd like to see the creative industry move toward an Open Source model over the coming years in an attempt to move us away from these confrontational rationalizations which are being driven by increasing demands around revenue. Perhaps this Open Source model would also allow us to better illustrate the problem of mass production of low quality movies and content. These low quality movies "have no legitimate purpose and only serve to infringe on moviegoer's rights, thus preventing them from enjoying their night and wasting their money on yet another crappy flick".
  • soft_dev_person 11y ago
    It's ironic that he even dares to state that piracy "negatively impacts audience experience". If anything, it is the legal ways to watch movies that have traditionally had the inverior experience. Forcing me to watch commercials or be warned that copyright is a crime for minutes before the actual content. Movie industry: You have always been burning bridges! Wake up, for crying out loud! </pointless rant>
• javiercr 11y ago
  I don't understand why the article says they have been operating under false identities. When they released the first version in 2014 they shared it on twitter mentioning all the team. > It's popcorn time! @getpopcornapp! /cc @tomasdev @abad @brunolazzaro @alan_reid https://twitter.com/diego_ar/status/432720371465609216 https://twitter.com/diego_ar/status/432720371465609216 I mean, if they were so concerned with their identity, they would have deleted that tweet, right?
  • dperalta 11y ago
    deleted (?)
• mizzao 11y ago
  The MPAA spends who-knows-how-many millions of dollars hiring lawyers and PIs to go after volunteer programmers in countries all over the world, when they could just be spending that on an online distribution system for movies that would provide the service that Popcorn Time currently does. There's demand for streaming movies and up-to-date releases with people willing to pay, why not meet it? This kind of parallels craigslist, which has turned the classifieds market into a multi-billion-dollar sinkhole (http://theweek.com/articles/461056/craigslist-took-nearly-1-billion-year-away-from-dying-newspapers http://theweek.com/articles/461056/craigslist-took-nearly-1-...). Except craigslist has critical mass and can't be easily replaced, whereas a concerted effort to innovate instead of stagnate by the movie industry could easily become a preferred service to PT.
  • untog 11y ago
    There's demand for streaming movies and up-to-date releases with people willing to pay, why not meet it? These services already exist, though (not movie-theatre-release up to date, but neither is Popcorn Time). Yet people still want to watch these movies for free. Let's not kid ourselves - yes, the MPAA could help to create a better system than currently exists for streaming movies. No, users of Popcorn Time won't suddenly start paying for movies while the free Popcorn Time service still exists.
    • saint_fiasco 11y ago
      They could at least try. Spotify is not making as much money as they could in a market full of perfect angels who never pirate, but they still get by.
      • untog 11y ago
        Netflix/Amazon Instant/iTunes is not making as much money as it could in a market full of perfect angels, too.
        • chronic41 11y ago
          rekt
• profinger 11y ago
  Never heard of the site until this article but this is the problem we've seen all too much. Most of the time, there's no paid service offering what we want. If there is, the price is unreasonable or the service is ridiculously locked down. This is the same thing that happened with music in the 90s etc. Finally, something like Spotify came around and made it so that music was actually AVAILABLE for us to explore not "you have to purchase this if you even want to know what the artist sounds like." If you want to watch football games online and you find that it's going to either cost you $20/game for only your home team's games and they cut out the announcers or something and double up on the commercials to pay for the network AND to pay for the game(hypothetical) and then you find that you can watch it on a third party streaming site for free and have your favorite announcer doing commentary, you're bound to not want to pay the ridiculous amount for it and move to using some less-than-wholesome service. There's no real solution to any of this aside from a paradigm shift. Yes, money is the motivation for creating a lot of this stuff. However, people are just going to continue to find ways around terrible ridiculous lock downs.
• tinalumfoil 11y ago
  > "Somebody told me that popcorn time is the Netflix killer and I think that isn't true. I think it's not a piracy problem, it's a service problem. You have to give the users what they want in a fair price." This is a pretty common sentiment on HN and other places on the internet that's used to justify piracy but I don't think it really applies to most people who say it. The person in the video is from Buenos Aires and really can't get his hands on movies and TV shows short of going to the United States. But if you're in the United States and want a TV show, between iTunes, Amazon instant, YouTube rentals, Google Play, Microsoft Store and your cable provider the movie is probably a $2-$3 HD rental. $5-$6 if its just released. If you have time to browse HN you're not poor enough to justify pirating over a $6 rental. Of course the counterargument is "but the DRM formats don't work on my TV/car/fridge", but that doesn't work here because Popcorn Time is designed for desktop viewing and deletes the videos on reboot, not for transferring to other devices. And "the only movies with high pirate rates aren't easily available" doesn't work either because the most pirated shows are the ones most easily available. Game of Thrones is on HBO Go, Walking Dead is on amc.com, Kingsman: The Secret Service and Seventh Son is on every rental service listed above. [0] [0] https://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-movies-of-the-week-050415/ https://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-movies-of-the-w... http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/top-10-pirated-tv-shows-of-2014-game-of-thrones-walking-dead-lead-list-1201390863/ http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/top-10-pirated-tv-shows...
  • chimeracoder 11y ago
    > the most pirated shows are the ones most easily available. Another way of interpreting this: 'the shows that are in the greatest demand are the ones for which the distributors feel pressured to offer the best service and availability'.
    • npizzolato 11y ago
      I'm unconvinced. Then the piracy rate would decrease for these shows as a result of better availability of HBO Go and other services, but I'm pretty sure they're still Game of Thrones is still the most downloaded torrent. I'd be open to data showing otherwise though. I think the simple answer is that people like free things, and torrenting is easy enough for a large amount of people to do it. Maybe if every show ever was available on Netflix for $9/month, people wouldn't torrent, but that's a pretty absurd expectation.
• c3534l 11y ago
  It's hard to feel bad for an industry that just flat out refuses to offer the products and services it's customers demand. 15 years ago I considered it ridiculous that TV shows weren't offered online. Popcorn Time should never have been able to get a foothold in the first place because people should have been able to access it's services legally. The video game industry has somewhat learned its lesson now that we have steam which has been great for gamers and developers (especially smaller developers). So, yeah, it's illegal and I understand why we have copyright laws. But people have been bitching about this and taking copyright law into their own hands since napster. Reading articles like these is like watching a youtube video of someone obnoxious get their ass kicked. I don't condone violence, but you get zero sympathy from me.
• korginator 11y ago
  In my part of the world, I pay for netflix (and deezer and apple streaming music) but we're locked out of many good shows because of artificially created region restrictions with no technical merit or justification other than the fact that the movie industry wants to squeeze blood from every region in the world separately, at the very least. Even with our local cable companies inking deals with HBO and other big names, we still don't get the latest shows or episodes even through their local streaming video on demand services, we have to wait months or sometimes years before it's legally available in our region... and I live in a country where people don't blink while splurging on the latest iPhone 6+ or Macbook pro or a new playstation 4. There's absolutely no logical reason that customers willing to pay for these shows should be locked out "just because", and this is what drives people to alternate tools like popcorn time. The music industry had their first taste with napster in the early '00s, and they fought the ideas tooth and nail instead of realizing it could be mutually beneficial to embrace this technology and bring music to more people faster. Now the movie industry is making the same mistakes and are facing the same result.
  • bko 11y ago
    When people view the current law as unjust, they are more likely to break it. This has a very negative impact on society as a whole as it makes them more cynical about their institutions and leads to more rule breaking unrelated to the unjust law. It would be in everybody's best interest to rethink how we approach digital property rights across borders. Paul Robinson had recently discussed this in a podcast: > One of the chapters we have is on Prohibition, American Prohibition. Which I think is really wonderful. Because that really demonstrates that dynamic on a large scale. For a lot of interesting reasons we throw it in, Prohibition. But then it's broken so often, even by public officials. Nobody takes it seriously. So, it's no surprise that you have a lot of violation of prohibition laws. What's less obvious to people but I think really telling, is that during Prohibition, crime rates generally went up. Even if it had nothing to do with Prohibition. You had crime rates going up because there was this general effect. People would look at the criminal law, see that they simply didn't see drinking alcohol as condemnable conduct and that undermined their faith that the criminal really knew what was condemnable and what wasn't; saw a lot of people breaking the criminal law and not feeling bad about it. There was, the community sense was that the criminal law was just being silly and out of step here. And that reduction in its reputation, it's moral reputation, translated into a lot of other areas. It was a very bad time for crime, until Prohibition was repealed and criminal law started trying to earn back some of its lost reputation. [0] [0] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/08/paul_robinson_o.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/08/paul_robinson_o.htm...
• username3 11y ago
  That wasn't Wired.
• MrBra 11y ago
  Why I did not now about this.