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GitHub reinstates Popcorn Time code
- bawolff 6y agoThis feels a little sensationalized. This is just how dmca work. Party 1 files a notice, party 2 files a counter notice, party 1 either puts up or shuts up. The article makes it sound like github is picking sides, where really they are just not getting in the middle of the fight.
- colejohnson66 6y agoThe use of quotes around “threat” really shows the sensationalization.
- jdsully 6y agoThis is far from how it should work. The MPAA needed to certify a good faith belief the code was infringing. There is no reasonable way they could believe that the code itself was infringing on their copyrights. The fact they had no concern at all filing a frivolous take-down request shows how broken the DMCA checks and balances are. This is a long standing problem [1] [1] https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/media-entertainment-law/30865/good-faith-belief-in-dmca-notice-and-takedown-provisions-requires-subjective-standard https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/media-entertainment-law/...
- colejohnson66 6y agoI don’t agree with what the MPAA did, but they didn’t claim the code was infringing on their rights. They claimed the code facilitated infringement, which is also not allowed under the DMCA.
- henriquez 6y agoIt’s _arguably_ not allowed by the DMCA, but outside the scope of the notice-and-takedown provisions which only provide for takedown of specific infringing works. Statutory infringements outside of that very narrow scope would require a traditional lawsuit with actual court oversight. MPAA is not stupid and they knowingly abused the process in this case because they wanted to put Microsoft in a tight situation and gauge their response. Of course it went exactly as planned with Microsoft rolling over like every other tech company that won’t stand up for its users’ rights. This is _exactly_ why we need decentralized P2P tech btw.
- colejohnson66 6y agoFrom the takedown request: > Moreover, the Project in question hosts software that is distributed and used to infringe on the MPA Member Studios’ copyrights. See Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 940 n.13 (2005) (‘the distribution of a product can itself give rise to liability where evidence shows that the distributor intended and encouraged the product to be used to infringe’) I agree though, they went around the courts with a DMCA takedown, and should’ve sued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,....
- henriquez 6y agoThe fact that the software could be used for infringement is irrelevant because the software itself is not infringing (someone else brought up web browsers as another example of this). The MPAA are legally savvy enough to know this was an abuse of process. If any DMCA reforms are needed, top of my list would be removing takedown privileges from copyright holders that abuse it.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoI wonder if you had say said same with a website that does not ban child porn or somehow encouraged paedophilia or let users discuss black lynching in public forum. I know they are extreme examples but sometimes the blanket statement like 'software itself is not infringing' should be used with more caution. In popcorn time's I support it to be back but this does not mean I support fully uncensored net.
- cecja 6y agoIt's the same, chrome and Firefox are actively used to view childporn on the tor network your argument is NULL or we can't use anything anymore.
- jdsully 6y agoIf laws are regularly abused for extraneous purposes then we no longer live in a society with rule of law. Armed gangs are replaced by teams of lawyers but the effect is the same. There may be value in taking down tools used to aid copyright but if that is a desired outcome congress should pass a law permitting it.
- henriquez 6y agoIt’s true, this was never a valid DMCA complaint in the first place. The fact that a company with the resources of Microsoft went along with it unquestioningly shows exactly what we can expect from their “benevolent stewardship” of all the developer resources they’ve recently acquired. I’ve already started moving my projects off of Github and will no longer use it outside of an employment context.
- bawolff 6y agoI agree, the original take down request was inappropriate (although i've heard of much worse abuses). I think everything after that point though was pretty standard, and in particular github's behaviour in all this wss very standard.
- nahtnam 6y agoI'm curious, what happens if companies non-stop file DMCA requests every two weeks?
- dannyw 6y agoIf they’re invalid, then eventually they can be taken into court for perjury.
- rolph 6y agocloned em all https://github.com/popcorn-official https://github.com/popcorn-official
- fmakunbound 6y agoEven https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-app https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-app ? That one seems to be missing with nothing but a bullshit DMCA notice in its place.
- leed25d 6y agoThe Hydra will just grow more heads. Hasn't the MPA figured this out yet?
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoThe most puzzling thing is they already beat piracy with netflix but now they are trying to kill the convenience by splitting content over 20 platforms causing piracy to come back.
- gpm 6y agoBeating piracy isn't the goal, maximizing profit is. Netflix was giving the industry what... 10 dollars per family? They think they can get more than that by splitting into 20 different platforms. They're probably right.
- save_ferris 6y agoThis is spot on, given the fact that the average US household cable bill was pretty outrageous to begin with.
- syshum 6y agoSadly I know people with a outrageous cable bill (hundreds of dollars per month) AND subscribe to 3 or more streaming services...
- save_ferris 6y agoThey definitely didn’t beat piracy with Netflix, I’m not even sure they slowed it down much. Netflix in 2020 is an entirely different service than it was in 2011 back when their library was full of major titles. The reality is that the owners of content want their own distribution platforms, maybe because they saw what Apple did to the music industry via iTunes, but I’m not sure.
- 6y ago
- ezoe 6y agoI don't get it. The No.1 copyright infringement tool is undoubtedly the most popular web browser, whichever that is.
- chii 6y agoThe browser have other, legitimate uses. Popcorntime pretty much has no other legitimate use other than as a tool for copyright infringement.
- saltedonion 6y agoI guess the legal argument akins that of Limewire and Pirate Bay
- dman 6y agoInvaluable for students in film school to showcase their work to a worldwide audience before they make it big in Hollywood.
- dvtrn 6y agoInteresting. Why a tool like popcorntime versus defaulting straight to YouTube or even Vimeo for film students?
- whathappenedto 6y agoThey're just trying to justify illegal software. Like when people defended P2P file sharing as "but you can use it to download linux" or recently bitcoin as "but it's also great for transferring money internationally."
- aaomidi 6y agoI'm not sure if comparing bitcoin to BitTorrent protocol is actually a valid comparison.
- getcrunk 6y agoWow. I'm done with GitHub. This is a vulnerability afaic. Just going to dissapear my code base huh.
- colejohnson66 6y agoIt’s not GitHub’s fault the DMCA exists
- getcrunk 6y agoYea but it is their fault for how they handled it. They could have froze and privated the repo and investigated the issue. This isn't the same as a pirated move or song on YouTube. This is code. And version control or code repos are very important.
- labster 6y agoNo, really, they have to wait for the counter notice or they are liable too. I’m sure MPAA would love to sue a billion dollar company and not just random people on the net.
- getcrunk 6y agoAs another commenter pointed out since it wasnt infringing directly (code wasn't infringing copyrighted code) it actually does not fall under that constraint. Even if I'm wrong, this is a valid way to dos my repo. Like when it happens on YouTube people loose money right and that's some people's main income. This can be even worse.
- odensc 6y agoHow almost every service provider reacts to DMCA notices is by taking down the content ASAP, and if they receive a counter-notice, putting it back up after 2 weeks. They do not make any decisions on whether the content is actually infringing or not. By doing that, they make themselves liable if it actually is copyright-infringing material. If you aren't okay with that, use a service provider in a jurisdiction not governed by DMCA laws, or run your own service provider and take on that liability yourself.
- teruakohatu 6y agoFunnily enough I was watching a YouTube video, or live stream, by popular artist Lost Frequencies in which he showed and explained how he remixed a song. Popcorn Time was prominently displayed in his Dock.
- SmallPeePeeMan 6y agoYay. Just yay.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoI had popcorn time installed for a while, but it kept running services in the background and spamming notifications, even when I killed them. After a few days of that I uninstalled it.
- thekyle 6y agoI don't know which platform you used it on but I've found the Windows version to be quite unstable. IMO the Linux version runs much better.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoIt was Android.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoLong press any notification and ban the app.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoThanks, although I was really trying to stop the service from doing things behind my back in general.
- toyg 6y agoThe mobile versions are a shitshow, they clearly have lower priority - probably because the main source of revenue for PT at the moment is the vpn contracts it tries to sell at every turn, which is really a desktop thing.
- noisy_boy 6y agoI noticed that too initially - the CPU usage was very high while the movie was playing. So I wrote a script to control the resources used by it. Haven't noticed the issue since so not sure if the latest version is "good" or it is the script.
- DethNinja 6y agoThis is why we need a p2p git storage. I wonder if IPFS can handle this.
- bArray 6y agoP2P git is an interesting idea indeed. There is GitTorrent [1], but it appears to be mostly abandoned at the moment (for the last 5 years). The idea is quite nice but I wish it wasn't based in NodeJS. I also don't like that it integrates BitCoin - personally I think it just motivates people to try and take over the project. EDIT: There's also GitChain [2] which again seems abandoned (since 6 years). [1] https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent [2] https://github.com/gitchain/gitchain https://github.com/gitchain/gitchain
- searchableguy 6y agohttps://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/
- Fiahil 6y agoThanks ! Nice to see Rust projects being on the spearhead of innovation !
- Legogris 6y agoThere are a couple of initiatives to this. Here's one (git over secure scuttlebutt): https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403LQoyf2DtR3WQfCkDKlheQU%3D.sha256 https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403LQoy...
- dvasdekis 6y agoSeems to be the most evolved of alternatives suggested. Thanks!!
- black_puppydog 6y agoI love git-ssb! There's one caveat: if you want to version things bigger than 5MB, you'll need to change the maximum blob size of your ssb client. Also, please be gentle with the instance linked above. If you're running patchwork and have git-ssb installed, it should be available on http://localhost:7718 http://localhost:7718 instead, that's really the way to go.
- toyg 6y agoThe funny thing is that the MPAA are so clueless, they don’t even know popcorntime are their own worst enemies. They kept splitting out, rewriting from scratch, failing to establish a trusted way of distributing the app, then the latest releases have been so bad that people are abandoning it in droves - you can see the fallout on reddit. The ban was meant to DOS them for a few weeks, now that cinemas are shut and all eyes are on digital, but ended up being a big advertising campaign for PT. Good on the lawyers for getting paid to fail! PT itself is a relatively banal app anyway, even if it gets nuked someone else will rewrite it. Napster begat Gnutella begat BitTorrent begat Popcorn, it will not end until the movie business gives consumers what they want: a cheap global service to watch anything anytime.
- mindfulhack 6y agoI also have another reason why I feel like download and off-line-only video is important: Privacy. Streaming services have increasingly terrifying and inescapable telemetry. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Google - all of them collect extremely telling things about us due to when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them, the collective profiling of us based on what we download in general...and many other things we don't even know about. After listening to Shoshana Zuboff's audiobook 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' - the most important book I have ever read on technology - I am very aware of this. The data companies don't want us to be aware of what they're doing to us. I'm not condoning piracy, and I believe content creators should be fairly compensated for their hard work - but unless there's a convenient way to be able to consume content in my own open-source local software such as MPV, all offline, and in full privacy without being spied on, I refuse to legitimise the alternative. I realise there's still blu-ray and DVD, but not always - many releases are web only, now. I'd even pay a premium more for such non-DRM content...your move, Hollywood. It was never natural to have people watch and profile us when we're already paying money to watch personal entertainment, on this massive global scale.
- legulere 6y agoWith peer to peer file sharing you tell the whole world what you are watching.
- Twirrim 6y agoNote: This is the company that now owns NPM. You can/should expect the same take-down standards to apply to code hosted there. If you weren't already, I'd strongly encourage having some kind of caching proxy between you and the NPM repositories, just to ensure that some kind of takedown action won't screw up your builds.
- speedgoose 6y agoThe risk is low for most dependencies. They have experienced the left-pad drama. I would rather have to fix my dependencies and have broken builds for a short while than having to maintain a npm cache.
- villgax 6y agoTime to fix that ESP stuck inside the Casio calculator as well
- swiley 6y agoIt makes sense. If GitHub ever became like YouTube instead of a “dumb pipe” there would be a mass exodus. Right now they hold canonical copies of the law in some places [0] and are owned by Microsoft so most people (me included) are ready to flip out if they do something awful. [0]https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc-law-html https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc-law-html
- michaelmior 6y agoI always find it interesting that inconvenience is seen as a justification for stealing. Although I did this myself for many years, so I guess I do get it after all. However, I think now in the age of Netflix and Hulu, I can get the majority of what I want at a reasonable price.
- aflag 6y agoI think calling copyright infringement stealing is a hyperbole. They are very different things. Sometimes it's more than an inconvenience, though. At the present moment in time, I have no way to legally watch all but 3 Rick and Morty's episodes from the latest season (episodes 6, 7 and 8). And that's a brand new show. Don't get me started on older movies/tv shows. We have the technology to allow everyone to have access to any film produced that we still have available in some format, but the distributors/copyright holders just can't organise themselves to make this happen, but instead give us a broken experience. I see projects like popcorn time pushing the boundaries a little bit, trying to make the problem evident. I, for one, would like to see the copyright law reviewed. It could require you to pay part of the profits from the derivative work to copyright holders, but not give the copyright holder the power to prevent you from distributing it, for instance. That could would allow netflix, apple tv, etc to have pretty much whatever they wanted in their collection.
- hashkb 6y agoHow do you figure you're entitled to watch everything that's ever been released? There's no precedent for that. Even taping with a VCR was in the gray area. You had to buy every movie individually, and that was really just a personal viewing license.
- qntty 6y agoHow do you figure that media companies are entitled to wield the power of the state in a way that doesn't create an institution of intellectual property that makes the world better for everyone?
- thrownaway954 6y agoI don't get why people would use something like popcorntime which by using you are almost guaranteed a lovely letter from your ISP (especially Comcast) when there are numerous movies sites you can go to cough cineb cough and watch whatever you want through a browser and not BitTorrent. It's the BitTorrent aspect of popcorntime that gets you flagged. Why take the risk using it?
- rochak 6y agoWhat if somebody uses a VPN to use PopcornTime?
- Sir_Substance 6y agoYou're looking at popcorn time through a US-centric viewpoint.
- cronix 6y agoAh yes, those "nasty" emails saying they can cut my service that I've been receiving weekly for about over 10 years now. They have your browsing history too, you know. It's not like you're not leaving a trail watching movies on pirate websites. I don't use popcorntime, but use bittorrent quite a bit. My guess on why they haven't cut my service is possibly that I live in an area with quite a few ISP's, so they know I'll just go to a competitor and they'd rather just send me automated form emails to claim they "did something" and keep the cash.
- guscost 6y agoThis is one of those times where it’s a good thing that GitHub got bought by the biggest company in the world.
- Paperweight 6y agoI used to help out a video rental store, which closed this month. I made them a mail-order rental catalogue (https://rent.leosvideos.ca/ https://rent.leosvideos.ca/) and looked into this whole fiasco. When you buy a DVD, you can rent it to others without a license. Physical ownership. When you buy a digital file, you're not allowed to rent it out to others without a license. Digital non-ownership. But you have the bits - that's physical ownership. People want "one place to rent movies" but that will never work. They'd be a middleman monopoly between you and the studios - and middleman monopolies always turn out bad. In my opinion, there is a "free market" system that the invisible hand wants, which is a digital analogue of what we had with physical distribution, that reconciles the fact that a digital file really is a (virtual) physical object (on a hard drive), and nothing else will work: You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming. Result: There would be multiple online streaming rental stores that have huge catalogues of whatever you want. Speculation: Everyone would just use those. Studios would raise the prices for digital files to $10k+ because they know it will be rented out. The total sales of units would amount to the high water mark of the number of people who want to watch a file at the same time. We'd have a rich market where there are multiple players in each layer.
- diegoperini 6y ago> You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming. This can never happen but only simulated, up to a point. Copying physical objects requires manufacture work, copying data is essentially free if you neglect the transmission costs. Whatever paradigm digital ownership adopts will not resemble the physical world renting mechanism. I used your sentence as a straw-man, please forgive me. :)
- Paperweight 6y agoI'd say the unit cost of running a proper streaming-rental service is about the same as burning a copy of a DVD (20 cents per movie). There's way more to it than just bandwidth. Sure you could still pirate (just like you could copy DVDs) but if the path of least resistance (factoring in quality, legal and moral costs) is to just rent it legitimately then that's what people would do. Video stores could have just copied DVDs and the studios were very afraid of DVD-Rs when they came out, but that didn't pan out because it's obviously illegal and immoral. There was a company in California in the early days that had actual people putting actual DVDs into actual DVD players that would stream on demand across the internet, but they folded when they got a legal threat. It might be legally OK - I don't think it's ever been tested in court.
- black_puppydog 6y agoSo, given how very p2p git is and all, where are all the hackers here willing to stick out their neck and actually share urls where a user would find popcorn-app now? ^-- that's a very sarcastic way to say: yes, git the protocol may be decentralized, but git the (distribution) ecosystem is not and was not ever really censorship resistant beyond "I can keep what I have and share it in a small circle"
- parliament32 6y agoThe funny thing about the streaming wars is that the music services somehow figured it out. I can pay for Google Play / Spotify / Apple Music and get literally all the music, for a single fee, from the same place. No content appearing/disappearing, no regional BS, no outrageous fees, it just works. Music piracy has basically died over the last few years cause of this -- I can't remember the last time I wanted to listen to something that I had to pirate. What's so different about TV/movies?
- thefunnyman 6y agoI generally agree though I will say that platform exclusive music still exists. I’ve seen this primarily with hip hop, especially when Tidal was trying to break into the streaming scene. Apple Music also occasionally has platform exclusives. Usually the way I’ve seen it work though is that these new releases are initially exclusives for something like one month and then become more widely available.
- spartas 6y agoApple happened. When iTunes was new, the music industry was more than happy to give up digital distribution, because they were more interested in selling discs, and any revenue they captures from Apple was extra. The movie industry saw what Apple did to music and so movie licensing and distribution became an entrenched mess.
- rajnathani 6y agoMovies are at least one to two orders of magnitude more expensive to make than entire music albums.
- parliament32 6y agoSo what? The number of albums available to stream is a few orders of magnitude higher than the number of shows/movies available.
- rajnathani 6y ago
- RMPR 6y agoJust like I said on Reddit. >According to the MPA, the application includes links to pirate sites, pirate APIs, and pirate torrent trackers, which are used to download pirated movies and TV-shows. Laughing in Awesome Piracy[0] 0: https://github.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy https://github.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy