38 ms·

Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

238 points by mmastrac 12y ago

comrade1 12y ago
It's incredibly risky taking on a project like this. In the u.s. copyright violations at this scale are now a criminal offense. And the u.s. has shown no qualms about enforcing their internal laws outside the u.s. And there have been recent examples of the NSA sharing information with the atf and so it wouldn't surprise if the nsa also shares info with the secret service or whoever is enforcing copyright these days. And what do you get out of it? No money. No bragging rights since you're desperate to keep your contributions secret. And you will inevitably be caught. And I'm speaking as a plex user. I state this in public because my plex use is easily trackable.
- xnull6guest 12y ago
  They get money out of it. The Pirate Bay makes a huge margin from the advertisements on their website. Edit: apparently they do not currently have ads on the website or in the app, so they do not currently make money.
  - mahouse 12y ago
    Does Popcorn Time sport ads?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - finnn 12y ago
      No
  - lvs 12y ago
    I guess you didn't read the article. There are no ads on Popcorn Time and no source of revenue for the developers.
    - xnull6guest 12y ago
      I did not read the article. Is there a website to get popcorn time or the 'torrent' files for them? This would be the place for ads. Edit: I have now read the article in full. Question about financing below.
      - untog 12y ago
        Here's an idea: read the article. If you still have questions after you've done that, then maybe ask them.
        xnull6guest 12y ago
        I just did this. It is not that ads are not possible, it is that ads are currently not shown. So here's a question: do we expect that to continue in perpetuity? My expectation would be that of the root comment: the website will in the future support its traffic and hosting costs with ads and make huge margins. Is there some reason why this expectation is foolish?
        untog 12y ago
        It's an expectation without proof. We have no evidence suggesting they will do that, nor any suggesting they won't. So it's a pretty academic conversation. They could turn Popcorn Time into a Bitcoin mining outfit without telling anyone, too. With the advent of S3 storage and the like I would imagine their hosting costs are very small, and almost all at download time, not run time.
        xnull6guest 12y ago
        All expectations have no proof? Yes it's speculation. Re: evidence. The evidence we do have is from precedent - former file sharing services that have made money from similar types of technologies (notably bit-torrent). It is an established fact that money can be made via advertizing and given both that CPUs are terrible at mining cryptocurrencies and that it would dramatically degrade performance the bitcoin suggestion is unlikely. Agreed that it is speculation. But this is what the OP asked for at the top: speculations as to why the developers would invest in the project. RE: costs being relatively low. Agreed. Revenue from ads are similarly small. The calculus is performed at scale - which is exactly what this technology hopes to be. The relatively low costs are what makes large margins with advertizing possible.
- SlashmanX 12y ago
  I worked on this for about 9 months, well the actual fork (popcorntime.io, not T4P). Was the leading contributor (probably still am). No one on that team was from the US, we did get calls from the MPAA though to try scare us. I definitely didn't try to keep my contributions secret
sroerick 12y ago
Does anybody know what it would require to fork Popcorn Time to only support Creative Commons and public domain content? I've spent a lot of time boycotting copyrighted works and I'd like to have a nice user interface to do this.
- mahouse 12y ago
  What better boycott than to pirate it?
  - gknoy 12y ago
    Infringing the copyright implies that you want it, which is, at least to a certain degree, the opposite of boycott.
  - untog 12y ago
    ...a legal boycott?
  - Crito 12y ago
    I wonder if studios cite piracy numbers when negotiating product placement rates. If movie piracy became particularly common (I do not believe that it currently is, despite what the MPAA claims), I bet they would. Increased product placement to offset revenue lost in ticket sales.
    - ddingus 12y ago
      A better framing would be product placement to better leverage infringing uses. Not every download / view is a lost sale. In fact, the more we look at this, the more we find the majority of them are not lost sales. There aren't enough entertainment dollars out there to fund it all. But they like the views. Who doesn't?
  - sroerick 12y ago
    I'd rather support artists who aren't using the copyright empire in order to monetize their art. I think any adult should be able to give up The Avengers for moral reasons. You don't need movie franchises that much.
takasc2 12y ago
What mistifies me is the sheer callousness/arrogance of the popcorn time developers. They must know they are playing with fire in a very public way but there is no need for them to be doing so. If they were just releasing a torrent client with streaming and media managment capabilities (the interesting part of the app) they would be fine but they insist on being as provocative and explicit about their desire to violate copyright as possible. The focus on public torrents is strange as well - in 2015 public torrents are a poisoned well disaster - they can't even compete with direct download sites any more - the product they were supposed to be more secure than.
- Crito 12y ago
  Why is it more moral for the developers to lie about their motivations? Surely, all else being equal, the developers being honest is a more desirable personality trait. They could claim that it isn't just for watching pirated hollywood movies, but that would be a blatantly transparent lie. If they do not fear retribution, why should they lie?
- neckro23 12y ago
  I had the same response when Napster originally came out -- it was too arrogantly blatant, it would get smacked down ASAP. And it did, but not before causing a significant shift in how seriously record labels approached downloadable music. Maybe something similar will happen here.
- ikeboy 12y ago
  What's wrong with public torrents? Why are direct download sites better? I usually find better speed with popular torrents than direct downloads. Edit: yeah, I know torrents aren't good for privacy, that's why I use a website that downloads torrents for me. (Or use a server.) But I still use torrents for that. I find that direct links tend to go down much faster than torrents stop being seeded. DCMA and all that.
lvs 12y ago
There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but the rules of competition are the same.
- ersii 12y ago
  One of the incentives is ironically, the ability to actually pay and get access to the content - regardless of price. If you're not in a prioritized market (Or maybe it's fairer to say "privileged market"?) - you can't even pay for the content and see it in a way you want. (Like, pay immediately and stream it). "Sorry, this content is not available in your region :/"
- natdempk 12y ago
  This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO player to load and start watching in HD immediately? Some services like Netflix get this and give the end user a better experience than Popcorn Time, but others only seem to exist for the hour before shows get uploaded as torrents.
  - wmf 12y ago
    Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash.
    - NathanCH 12y ago
      I think that further proves his point. It shouldn't matter what device I'm consuming the content on.
_rpd 12y ago
Popcorn Time doesn't anonymize BitTorrent participation, right? Just makes it easier?
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Correct. You'd still need a VPN proxy to be anonymous.
- realusername 12y ago
  Yes, it's just a BitTorrent client at the end, nothing is changing on that. The improvements are mostly on the UI and the ease to find things.
- darklajid 12y ago
  Right, and that is the biggest issue I have with the unstoppable claim. I understand that they talk about the service, but even when they mention potential personal liability for the developers in the end, end users are ignored. This is as 'stoppable' or dangerous as torrenting content is in your legislation and this product/service doesn't protect you from prosecution.
trengrj 12y ago
It seems a little weird that the fork Wired is promoting in this post is the fork alleged to have malware http://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2lyxnm/time4popcorn_popcorntimese_now_includes_adware_do/ http://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2lyxnm/time4pop... (also known as Time4Popcorn). I don't know why they didn't promote popcorntime.io instead which is the more popular and open fork ranking higher on Google etc.
- lvs 12y ago
  It's not clear if any of that is true: https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2n3dht/time4popcorn_install_logs_putting_the_spyware/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2n3dht/time4po...
  - trengrj 12y ago
    There are many instances of people reporting boomcheap malware after installing Time4Popcorn (popcorn-time.se): https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2l3d4t/boomcheap_found_on_my_computer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2l3d4t/boomche... Time4Popcorn probably had to rebrand to popcorn-time.se for these issues. It is not properly open source, while on popcorntime.io you can see the latest source at git.popcorntime.io, on popcorn-time.se you can only get tar balls. Time4Popcorn (popcorn-time.se) does not even include the node-webkit viewer in their app. The executable itself is just a iframe to http://app.popcorn-time.se/ http://app.popcorn-time.se/.
  - thefreeman 12y ago
    That report means very little. The guy actively admits he doesn't even know what to look for, and ran his tests on a default virtual machine without any anti-anti-debugging techniques at all. It is extremely common for malware to detect standard virtual machine setups and not activate their payload.
- thefreeman 12y ago
  Agreed. popcorntime.io is fully open source and under active development https://git.popcorntime.io/groups/popcorntime https://git.popcorntime.io/groups/popcorntime . The other one is a rip off site.
madez 12y ago
Many here talk about how Popcorn Time violates copyright law of the United States of Central North America. Please note, not all countries were already bullied into enforcing these laws. Also, there are people who just don't agree with this specific approach to copyright. If need be, development can go into the dark web.
- mr337 12y ago
  Don't worry, we have the TPP do bully your country to US laws. /sarcasm
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
zaroth 12y ago
If I were going to download copyrighted material, I certainly wouldn't do it over BitTorrent. When the software architecture ensures the only target is the end user, surely end users will end up targeted. When that happens, that single download which would have fallen below the $1,000 threshold is now actually criminal distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution. Your VPN provider's IP address is public information. A quick subpoena is all it would take to reveal your identity. Seems like a risky way to watch Game of Thrones. At least on Usenet a download is just a download.
- abandonliberty 12y ago
  Could you elaborate how this is more secure?
  - Nursie 12y ago
    More secure? Not necessarily, but usenet is download-only, so usenet users could not be charged with uploading/distribution.
  - wodenokoto 12y ago
    Its not more secure, you are just less liable. If you DL via torrents you automatically share the content as well. So you are not just DL illegal content, but also distributing it.
    - EC1 12y ago
      Only if you seed right?
      - Nursie 12y ago
        No, if you participate in the swarm with any upload activity at all. You know, the whole P2P thing...
      - wodenokoto 12y ago
        most client will upload while you are downloading. I believe in BitTorrent terminology it is only call seeding when you keep uploading after you have downloaded everything
plg 12y ago
so what is the liability of users who watch movies on popcorn time?
- mahouse 12y ago
  Depends on the local regulations...
  - plg 12y ago
    How about (a) USA, (b) Canada, (c) UK?
sathio 12y ago
it would be great if an html5/JS interface existed for MP4 videos. I think it's possible
slavasmirnov 12y ago
its time for them to change. triple win is hard, but worth trying - http://soon.thanks.ly http://soon.thanks.ly
slavasmirnov 12y ago
its time for them to change. triple win is hard, but worth trying - http://soon.thanks.ly http://soon.thanks.ly
michaelmcmillan 12y ago
I just can not let go of the thought of somehow having a completely decentralized internet. It would be so extremely powerful. I am aware of those who have tried, but IIRC they usually have some centralized component.
dep_b 12y ago
The nick "pochoclin" seems to be based on the Argentinean word for popcorn, pochoclo
tobias2014 12y ago
What happened to the plans of an I2P integration?

238 points by mmastrac 12y ago

It's incredibly risky taking on a project like this. In the u.s. copyright violations at this scale are now a criminal offense. And the u.s. has shown no qualms about enforcing their internal laws outside the u.s. And there have been recent examples of the NSA sharing information with the atf and so it wouldn't surprise if the nsa also shares info with the secret service or whoever is enforcing copyright these days. And what do you get out of it? No money. No bragging rights since you're desperate to keep your contributions secret. And you will inevitably be caught. And I'm speaking as a plex user. I state this in public because my plex use is easily trackable.

xnull6guest 12y ago
They get money out of it. The Pirate Bay makes a huge margin from the advertisements on their website. Edit: apparently they do not currently have ads on the website or in the app, so they do not currently make money.
- mahouse 12y ago
  Does Popcorn Time sport ads?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - finnn 12y ago
    No
- lvs 12y ago
  I guess you didn't read the article. There are no ads on Popcorn Time and no source of revenue for the developers.
  - xnull6guest 12y ago
    I did not read the article. Is there a website to get popcorn time or the 'torrent' files for them? This would be the place for ads. Edit: I have now read the article in full. Question about financing below.
    - untog 12y ago
      Here's an idea: read the article. If you still have questions after you've done that, then maybe ask them.
      - xnull6guest 12y ago
        I just did this. It is not that ads are not possible, it is that ads are currently not shown. So here's a question: do we expect that to continue in perpetuity? My expectation would be that of the root comment: the website will in the future support its traffic and hosting costs with ads and make huge margins. Is there some reason why this expectation is foolish?
        untog 12y ago
        It's an expectation without proof. We have no evidence suggesting they will do that, nor any suggesting they won't. So it's a pretty academic conversation. They could turn Popcorn Time into a Bitcoin mining outfit without telling anyone, too. With the advent of S3 storage and the like I would imagine their hosting costs are very small, and almost all at download time, not run time.
        xnull6guest 12y ago
        All expectations have no proof? Yes it's speculation. Re: evidence. The evidence we do have is from precedent - former file sharing services that have made money from similar types of technologies (notably bit-torrent). It is an established fact that money can be made via advertizing and given both that CPUs are terrible at mining cryptocurrencies and that it would dramatically degrade performance the bitcoin suggestion is unlikely. Agreed that it is speculation. But this is what the OP asked for at the top: speculations as to why the developers would invest in the project. RE: costs being relatively low. Agreed. Revenue from ads are similarly small. The calculus is performed at scale - which is exactly what this technology hopes to be. The relatively low costs are what makes large margins with advertizing possible.
SlashmanX 12y ago
I worked on this for about 9 months, well the actual fork (popcorntime.io, not T4P). Was the leading contributor (probably still am). No one on that team was from the US, we did get calls from the MPAA though to try scare us. I definitely didn't try to keep my contributions secret

sroerick 12y ago

Does anybody know what it would require to fork Popcorn Time to only support Creative Commons and public domain content? I've spent a lot of time boycotting copyrighted works and I'd like to have a nice user interface to do this.

mahouse 12y ago
What better boycott than to pirate it?
- gknoy 12y ago
  Infringing the copyright implies that you want it, which is, at least to a certain degree, the opposite of boycott.
- untog 12y ago
  ...a legal boycott?
- Crito 12y ago
  I wonder if studios cite piracy numbers when negotiating product placement rates. If movie piracy became particularly common (I do not believe that it currently is, despite what the MPAA claims), I bet they would. Increased product placement to offset revenue lost in ticket sales.
  - ddingus 12y ago
    A better framing would be product placement to better leverage infringing uses. Not every download / view is a lost sale. In fact, the more we look at this, the more we find the majority of them are not lost sales. There aren't enough entertainment dollars out there to fund it all. But they like the views. Who doesn't?
- sroerick 12y ago
  I'd rather support artists who aren't using the copyright empire in order to monetize their art. I think any adult should be able to give up The Avengers for moral reasons. You don't need movie franchises that much.

takasc2 12y ago

What mistifies me is the sheer callousness/arrogance of the popcorn time developers. They must know they are playing with fire in a very public way but there is no need for them to be doing so. If they were just releasing a torrent client with streaming and media managment capabilities (the interesting part of the app) they would be fine but they insist on being as provocative and explicit about their desire to violate copyright as possible. The focus on public torrents is strange as well - in 2015 public torrents are a poisoned well disaster - they can't even compete with direct download sites any more - the product they were supposed to be more secure than.

Crito 12y ago
Why is it more moral for the developers to lie about their motivations? Surely, all else being equal, the developers being honest is a more desirable personality trait. They could claim that it isn't just for watching pirated hollywood movies, but that would be a blatantly transparent lie. If they do not fear retribution, why should they lie?
neckro23 12y ago
I had the same response when Napster originally came out -- it was too arrogantly blatant, it would get smacked down ASAP. And it did, but not before causing a significant shift in how seriously record labels approached downloadable music. Maybe something similar will happen here.
ikeboy 12y ago
What's wrong with public torrents? Why are direct download sites better? I usually find better speed with popular torrents than direct downloads. Edit: yeah, I know torrents aren't good for privacy, that's why I use a website that downloads torrents for me. (Or use a server.) But I still use torrents for that. I find that direct links tend to go down much faster than torrents stop being seeded. DCMA and all that.

lvs 12y ago

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but the rules of competition are the same.

ersii 12y ago
One of the incentives is ironically, the ability to actually pay and get access to the content - regardless of price. If you're not in a prioritized market (Or maybe it's fairer to say "privileged market"?) - you can't even pay for the content and see it in a way you want. (Like, pay immediately and stream it). "Sorry, this content is not available in your region :/"
natdempk 12y ago
This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO player to load and start watching in HD immediately? Some services like Netflix get this and give the end user a better experience than Popcorn Time, but others only seem to exist for the hour before shows get uploaded as torrents.
- wmf 12y ago
  Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash.
  - NathanCH 12y ago
    I think that further proves his point. It shouldn't matter what device I'm consuming the content on.

_rpd 12y ago

Popcorn Time doesn't anonymize BitTorrent participation, right? Just makes it easier?

toomuchtodo 12y ago
Correct. You'd still need a VPN proxy to be anonymous.
realusername 12y ago
Yes, it's just a BitTorrent client at the end, nothing is changing on that. The improvements are mostly on the UI and the ease to find things.
darklajid 12y ago
Right, and that is the biggest issue I have with the unstoppable claim. I understand that they talk about the service, but even when they mention potential personal liability for the developers in the end, end users are ignored. This is as 'stoppable' or dangerous as torrenting content is in your legislation and this product/service doesn't protect you from prosecution.

trengrj 12y ago

It seems a little weird that the fork Wired is promoting in this post is the fork alleged to have malware http://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2lyxnm/time4popcorn_popcorntimese_now_includes_adware_do/ http://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2lyxnm/time4pop... (also known as Time4Popcorn). I don't know why they didn't promote popcorntime.io instead which is the more popular and open fork ranking higher on Google etc.

lvs 12y ago
It's not clear if any of that is true: https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2n3dht/time4popcorn_install_logs_putting_the_spyware/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2n3dht/time4po...
- trengrj 12y ago
  There are many instances of people reporting boomcheap malware after installing Time4Popcorn (popcorn-time.se): https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2l3d4t/boomcheap_found_on_my_computer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2l3d4t/boomche... Time4Popcorn probably had to rebrand to popcorn-time.se for these issues. It is not properly open source, while on popcorntime.io you can see the latest source at git.popcorntime.io, on popcorn-time.se you can only get tar balls. Time4Popcorn (popcorn-time.se) does not even include the node-webkit viewer in their app. The executable itself is just a iframe to http://app.popcorn-time.se/ http://app.popcorn-time.se/.
- thefreeman 12y ago
  That report means very little. The guy actively admits he doesn't even know what to look for, and ran his tests on a default virtual machine without any anti-anti-debugging techniques at all. It is extremely common for malware to detect standard virtual machine setups and not activate their payload.
thefreeman 12y ago
Agreed. popcorntime.io is fully open source and under active development https://git.popcorntime.io/groups/popcorntime https://git.popcorntime.io/groups/popcorntime . The other one is a rip off site.

madez 12y ago

Many here talk about how Popcorn Time violates copyright law of the United States of Central North America. Please note, not all countries were already bullied into enforcing these laws. Also, there are people who just don't agree with this specific approach to copyright. If need be, development can go into the dark web.

mr337 12y ago
Don't worry, we have the TPP do bully your country to US laws. /sarcasm

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

zaroth 12y ago

If I were going to download copyrighted material, I certainly wouldn't do it over BitTorrent. When the software architecture ensures the only target is the end user, surely end users will end up targeted. When that happens, that single download which would have fallen below the $1,000 threshold is now actually criminal distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution. Your VPN provider's IP address is public information. A quick subpoena is all it would take to reveal your identity. Seems like a risky way to watch Game of Thrones. At least on Usenet a download is just a download.

abandonliberty 12y ago
Could you elaborate how this is more secure?
- Nursie 12y ago
  More secure? Not necessarily, but usenet is download-only, so usenet users could not be charged with uploading/distribution.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  Its not more secure, you are just less liable. If you DL via torrents you automatically share the content as well. So you are not just DL illegal content, but also distributing it.
  - EC1 12y ago
    Only if you seed right?
    - Nursie 12y ago
      No, if you participate in the swarm with any upload activity at all. You know, the whole P2P thing...
    - wodenokoto 12y ago
      most client will upload while you are downloading. I believe in BitTorrent terminology it is only call seeding when you keep uploading after you have downloaded everything

plg 12y ago

so what is the liability of users who watch movies on popcorn time?

mahouse 12y ago
Depends on the local regulations...
- plg 12y ago
  How about (a) USA, (b) Canada, (c) UK?

sathio 12y ago

it would be great if an html5/JS interface existed for MP4 videos. I think it's possible

slavasmirnov 12y ago

its time for them to change. triple win is hard, but worth trying - http://soon.thanks.ly http://soon.thanks.ly

slavasmirnov 12y ago

its time for them to change. triple win is hard, but worth trying - http://soon.thanks.ly http://soon.thanks.ly

michaelmcmillan 12y ago

I just can not let go of the thought of somehow having a completely decentralized internet. It would be so extremely powerful. I am aware of those who have tried, but IIRC they usually have some centralized component.

dep_b 12y ago

The nick "pochoclin" seems to be based on the Argentinean word for popcorn, pochoclo

tobias2014 12y ago

What happened to the plans of an I2P integration?