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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
by comrade1 11y 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 11y agoThey 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 11y agoDoes Popcorn Time sport ads?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- finnn 11y agoNo
- lvs 11y agoI guess you didn't read the article. There are no ads on Popcorn Time and no source of revenue for the developers.
- xnull6guest 11y agoI 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 11y agoHere's an idea: read the article. If you still have questions after you've done that, then maybe ask them.
- xnull6guest 11y agoI 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 11y agoIt'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 11y agoAll 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 11y agoI 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