Popcorn Time is _this_ close to being the Napster of Film, Hollywood must be literally shitting bricks. Someone has probably taken it upon himself to threaten these devs in a nasty (and perhaps illegal) way. Surely the story will come out eventually.
In the meantime, Popcorn Time is fully available to download. So I'm not sure what genie they're putting back in the bottle....
The threat could be nothing more than suing for copyright violation. The fines for that are insanely high, and evidence of such is not necessarily hard to collect. After all, it's highly unlikely the devs were developing Popcorn Time without using it themselves.
They wouldn't even have to use it themselves. If I understand rightly, "contributory copyright infringement"[1] is the stick they would get beaten with here.
My hazy understanding is that if the Popcorn Time folks had wanted to get away with this, they shouldn't have said anything about Hollywood movies. They should have promoted it as a tool for watching all the great publicly-licensed documentaries and fan-made films out there on the torrent network. That would give them "substantial non-infringing use" [2]. And if somebody else published instructions on how to change the configs so you'd also get Hollywood's finest, well, that wouldn't be their fault. Oopsie!
I wonder if the way they threatened them is with such a lawsuit...unless they delete everything. But were all the devs (other than the original ones) from US? I don't think copyright fines are as huge in other places.
Either way, whoever will be working next on it, it would be preferable if he was from Spain:
Surely they download at least a bit of a movie to test. Setting up a mock service that pushes open source video might be a technical solution, but that might not matter once you're in front of a judge.
It's likely because Hollywood won't LET them "offer legitimate ways to purchase the content".
There's a device that will allow normal people to watch new theater movies at home, but it's $500 per viewing after buying the highly-secured $35000 Prima video server. There are also a bunch of requirements that the company checks in person before allowing someone to buy into the service.
Fair enough. What about older movies that are available from Netflix or Amazon, iTunes, etc? Popcorn time could at least provide some links for purchasing the media.
I don't watch a lot of films/TV series, so I would totally pay to watch a single TV episode/film. But I'm on Linux, and I don't know how to do that with iTunes, or if it's even possible. Hulu and Netflix require a subscription, which gets way too expensive because I don't watch a lot of stuff, and when trying to purchase an episode on Amazon I'm greeted with the following:
> We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.
I simply can't find any site that lets me pay to download a movie/TV show episode, so I usually turn to Pirate Bay.
That doesn't look that bad. Now if it had a personalizable lists with information when what show (that's still running) airs, it would be better. Sadly I still haven't found anything better than ezTV and I don't even use their torrent links…
> Someone has probably taken it upon himself to threaten these devs in a nasty (and perhaps illegal) way.
Someone, you say? How about just stating the fucking obvious: That "someone" is The US Government, and this is just standard gag-order fare. "Stop developing the app, or we will fuck up your life. Oh, and don't say a word about this to anyone, or we'll fuck up your life."
This insanity is obviously unconstitutional (for starters), but since the USG obviously doesn't give a fuck anyway, what with the all-encompassing surveillance and all, this has become just business as usual.
What video is that, "how to completely not understand the way a society works and that you are part of a society"?
Edit: The video presenter says "don't pay taxes, don't follow laws".
That's like not getting your children vaccinated - a benefit for you in the short term, assuming nothing everything else stays the same. All other people are vaccinated so there's nobody you can catch the disease from anyway. Most people pay taxes so there's no degradation in the local life, but you have more money and more choices.
But if there were no taxes and no law for everyone, you wouldn't be able to do that. Rule of law keeps buildings built to a safe standard, keeps food edible, keeps water drinkable, keeps airlines basically safe, keeps employers from abusing employees with low wages and no safety codes, keeps businesses from wrecking and polluting the local town/city environment.
How much are you really going to be able to keep of your earnings if you have to personally guard it 24/7 because there's no police, no law, no way to stop someone stronger taking it without followup, and no banks you trust?
And how much is that money going to be worth anyway if there's no government to say that it has value by fiat? Who will take your money if they have no guarantee anyone else values it?
> The video presenter says "don't pay taxes, don't follow laws".
I agree that telling people not to pay taxes is a bit silly when doing that will get you hauled to jail. But that brings us to the video's point: we should not have rulers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNIgztvyU2U
> Rule of law keeps buildings built to a safe standard, keeps food edible, keeps water drinkable, keeps airlines basically safe, keeps employers from abusing employees with low wages and no safety codes, keeps businesses from wrecking and polluting the local town/city environment.
There's too much to unpack there. But having no ruleRs doesn't mean having no rules. Besides, in case you haven't noticed, the so-called rule of law only applies to us little folks, not Wall Street banksters, for example.
If you commit fraud, you go to jail. If a banker commits fraud, he will face no negative consequences. He'll just be collecting massive bonuses for wrecking the economy.
As for the other stuff, if you build a shit airplane and it crashes, you'll have a hard time convincing people to buy more of your airplanes. No one is more motivated to make sure Boeing's aircrafts are safe than Boeing itself.
The same applies to food. If your food products harm people, no one will want to buy them, and you won't get any money.
But this only works all the way in a free market, where all exchanges are voluntary, and thus, everything is subject to competition.
> How much are you really going to be able to keep of your earnings if you have to personally guard it 24/7 because there's no police, no law, no way to stop someone stronger taking it without followup, and no banks you trust?
This is a common sticking point, and I was stuck too. But then I realized that whenever someone wants to hurt you somewhere, a police officer will not materialize there to protect you. The government doesn't actually prevent any crimes, it only discourages (ordinary) people from committing them. The same kind of discouragement can be arranged without a government, and will work a lot better because it's based on voluntary co-operation, and therefore can't be bribed to look the other way.
> And how much is that money going to be worth anyway if there's no government to say that it has value by fiat?
Gold was happily used as a currency for ages, without anyone decreeing that it has value. Money just doesn't work that way. Gold was used exactly because everyone wanted it (ie. it had universal value), it was durable, divisible, and so on.
Our fiat currencies only have value because governments force us to pay taxes in them. Otherwise no one would use such unreliable currencies.
Besides, in case you haven't noticed, the so-called rule of law only applies to us little folks, not Wall Street banksters, for example.
Life's unfair. Rule of law applies in some sense - if I put my savings in a bank (UK), the government guarantees them even in the event of the bank going bankrupt. Why not apply the law more carefully and thoroughly instead of throwing it away?
The same applies to food. If your food products harm people, no one will want to buy them, and you won't get any money.
You say this as if con-artists and careless people have never hurt anyone ever, and it's just an imaginary situation. Why do we even have the concept of "snake oil" if people aren't tempted to buy things that don't work? Why do people today buy and sell harmful foods that taste nice, and "alternative medicines" that cost a lot and do nothing?
Why do we need environmental regulation stopping companies dumping neurotoxins in local waterways?
If your idea worked, it would already work and there would never have been any need for these laws to be enacted in the first place.
Instead, we got awful unsafe mines and factories, that people died and got mutilated by. After that, people gradually fought for laws to make companies make them safer.
Why do we hear about problems in Foxconn factories? Surely if your idea worked, people would stop buying devices made in Foxconn factories, the factories would make everything hunky dory, and then we wouldn't hear anything. Yet that isn't happening. Why did we have to have laws to stop people smoking in public - why do people smoke at all? Why aren't we all rushing to be first countries to move to nuclear power plants? Why is there such a thing as an obesity epidemic, if people stop buying things that hurt them?
People don't buy harmful things? People won't make harmful things? As if!
Maybe you could argue that it works in a sense... it only took Korean Airways 16 aircraft losses, 700 deaths, thirty years, being kicked out of SkyTeam, having a safety record 17x worse than other companies, a quarter billion dollars per year losses, having a USDoD ban on employees flying with it, and an FAA ban on Korean Air expanding service to the USA, before they started to change their safety practises.
Oh wait, thirty years of needlessly killing passengers, but after four months of US Government intervention they sorted things out to be high in the safety rankings, back in the code sharing, have restrictions lifted and be back in profit all in two years? Guess you can't really argue that people wouldn't buy their dangerous service or that the market would make them fix it after all.
Gold was happily used as a currency for ages, without anyone decreeing that it has value. Money just doesn't work that way. Gold was used exactly because everyone wanted it (ie. it had universal value), it was durable, divisible, and so on.
At its highest ever price, all gold ever mined put together would be worth ~8 trillion dollars. The USA GDP is 17 trillion dollars, for the USA alone. (Both Wikipedia). Where are you going to get enough gold to back the entire economy?
"Since the 1950s, annual gold output growth has approximately kept pace with world population growth of around 2x, although far less than world economic growth of some 8x"
There are ~192 countries in the world. How many use a gold standard now? 0.
It was workable a hundred years ago. Now it isn't.
>> we should not have rulers
> Explain "should not"?
It’s a violation of our rights, for starters. Second, it doesn’t benefit society at large. A ruler’s rule only benefits himself, and his cronies. And finally, as the “If You Were King” video explained, you can’t be a “good ruler” - there’s no such thing, because whatever good you’d like to accomplish, is financed by the immorality of robbing people for taxes. Besides, whatever you wanted to accomplish would require people doing something to that end, and they’d either do it voluntarily (and your rule would be unnecessary), or you’d have to force them and then you’re just being a thug.
> Life's unfair. Rule of law applies in some sense - if I put my savings in a bank (UK), the government guarantees them even in the event of the bank going bankrupt.
That’s irrelevant, and not even a net benefit to society, again, because those guarantees cause people not to care which bank they put their money in. Without such guarantees, people would only use trustworthy banks, and banks would have to show trustworthiness through their actions. Besides, any deposit guarantee by the government is paid from money that’s been forcefully confiscated from everyone. Oh, and there’s a limit to how many deposit guarantees they can actually carry out without the economy imploding from inflation etc.
> Why not apply the law more carefully and thoroughly instead of throwing it away?
Again, no rulers doesn’t mean no rules. You’re thinking of laws in a positive way, and there they represent common rules for people to follow, for the benefit of everyone. And that’s exactly the kind of laws/rules that would exist in a free society.
But the laws in our societies today are commands issued to us by governments. It’s always either: “You’re not allowed to do X”, or “You must do X”, and if you’re found to disobey the command, you will be punished. It’s important to realize that the vast majority of laws have nothing to do with our morals, they’re all about controlling/fleecing/ruling us and benefiting the rulers’ corporate buddies.
>> ”There are multiple classes of people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected. Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class hierarchy, and the very idea that we are equal before the law is a laughable nonsequitur.”
Speaking of laws, what if I write down on a piece of paper that everyone must eat Surströmming ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=31... ) at least once per day. Does that mean everyone has to obey my command to eat it? No? -What if me and a couple of buddies convene around a table and formulate the rule in a more “official” way, maybe something like “all citizens shall be required to partake in Surströmming at least once per day”? -Would that be enough? Still no? -Well what if we make it a piece of parchment instead, and use a high quality fountain pen, and maybe even stamp a couple of pictures of eagles on top? Would my Surströmming decree turn into a rule that everyone is morally obligated to follow then?
Of course not, people would just laugh at my insanity. But what if I declared that I’ve got an army, a police force, and prisons and that anyone who disobeys my Surströmming rule will be thrown in jail? .. Funny how that works, huh? https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ng...
> You say this as if con-artists and careless people have never hurt anyone ever, and it's just an imaginary situation.
Nope, I’m just talking about the incentives involved. Sure, there are some snake-oil salesmen around, but they’re rare.
But we’re getting sidetracked here, and I’m trying to wrap this up some time soon. You’re thinking that governments protect us as consumers, and make sure our flights reach their destinations and that we’re not sold toxic crap for food and so on. But the reality is that no government bureaucrat needs to tell Boeing to make airplanes that don’t fall down and kill people, and that governments don’t, in fact, make sure everything we consume is safe.
Boeing wants to make money through manufacturing and selling airplanes. Boeing’s customers, the airlines, want to make money by selling flights to people. Airlines need airplanes, but both need customers to make any money. It’s crucial to both that the planes are as safe as humanly possible. I have no idea what happened in Korea, but there’s no way around what I just said there. Korean Air does not need a US government bureaucrat to order them to do whatever they can to keep receiving money from their customers.
> Why do people today buy and sell harmful foods that taste nice
Well why do they? We’ve got governments to protect us from harmful food, right?
> Why do we need environmental regulation stopping companies dumping neurotoxins in local waterways?
I don’t know. Why do we need regulation to prevent BP from spilling a shit-ton of oil in the Gulf of Mexico? -Oh wait.. :p
> Why do we hear about problems in Foxconn factories?
>> Given that Chinese government prohibits independent trade labor unions, and that the sole official union, All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) has done little to represent workers, it appears that human rights and labor organizations have stepped up to fill that gap.
In other words, the Chinese government is preventing Chinese workers from forming effective unions.
> Why is there such a thing as an obesity epidemic, if people stop buying things that hurt them?
That’s a separate issue. I meant food that’s actively harmful, in a way that gets noticed. But people can stuff themselves with fast food for ages before suffering any permanent damage from their lifestyle.
> People don't buy harmful things? People won't make harmful things? As if!
Of course they do. But governments don’t protect us from ourselves either! That's our job regardless of whether we have rulers.
> At its highest ever price, all gold ever mined put together would be worth ~8 trillion dollars. The USA GDP is 17 trillion dollars, for the USA alone. (Both Wikipedia). Where are you going to get enough gold to back the entire economy?
We’ve got astounding numbers of “nominal wealth” floating around, but that doesn’t mean precious metals wouldn’t do just fine as a foundation for a sound currency.
>” Since the 1950s, annual gold output growth has approximately kept pace with world population growth of around 2x, although far less than world economic growth of some 8x"
There are ~192 countries in the world. How many use a gold standard now? 0.
Of course they don’t, because a gold standard places limits on what governments can do. That’s exactly why the world’s governments got rid of it.
It was probably Hollywood's lawyers, and it is likely constitutional.
They can't shut somebody up for their opinions. But if you do something illegal or actionable (in this case, contributory copyright infringement), you may prefer shutting up to accepting the full legal consequences of your actions.
> Popcorn Time is _this_ close to being the Napster of Film
No it's not. The elephant in the room that no wants to talk about is that Popcorn Time doesn't work on a television. Television is where people watch movies.
Back in the late 90s when Napster was a real mainstream thing, people didn't just listen to the music on their computers, they burnt them to CDs and took them to their cars, to parties, etc.
This is becoming less and less important. My TV is just a display for a Mac Mini, for example. If I had an AppleTV, I could just mirror the content straight to that. Before all this useful extravagance, I just hooked my computer up to my TV using (gasp) a cable. Worked great, and me and most other people I know, especially those younger than me, are fully used to making this work.
Even then, my girlfriend could not care less about even having a TV. She watches everything on her computer and is perfectly happy.
That's fine and all, but it's very important today. There were file sharing services before Napster, but Napster became popular after cdrw started being put in desktops you could buy at the local computer store (yes, people went to those back then).
> Even then, my girlfriend could not care less about even having a TV. She watches everything on her computer and is perfectly happy.
Sure, and people have been watching DVDs on their computers for years as well, but is there any data that this trend has gone up to a significant degree, or that watching movies is not still done overwhelmingly on a television?
> That's fine and all, but it's very important today. There were file sharing services before Napster, but Napster became popular after cdrw started being put in desktops you could buy at the local computer store (yes, people went to those back then).
are you forgetting Apple TV, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, HDMI cables, etc?
Those things are not refined. The primary innovation of Popcorn Time is that it lets you watch torrented movies without knowing the details of how it works. Having a movie being streamed from your computer (eating up battery) and then pushing it to a set top box (all of which are niche products at the moment) or hooking it up through HDMI cables and then having to find your laptop's power supply so you can plug it in right next to the tv.... all of that clunkiness ruins Popcorn Time's primary selling point.
If someone were to build Popcorn Time as an iPhone or Android app that streams to Chromecast / AppleTV, that would be the next logical step, and then we might be able to talk about it being the new Napster.
Sounds like the "No True Napster" argument. Cd players had to be plugged into stereos and speakers, too. Do you recall how unfriendly CD burning software was in the 1990s?
Not that unfriendly for the time. I'll remind you that Napster itself would be considered a UX nightmare by today's standard but for the time it was used by ever high school and college student in the country. Standards change.
They used it because it made content consumption possible. They did anything they could to get the content. There were all kinds of barriers: cables to connect your stereo (everyone did this), CD burning, file management, media players, corrupt files, bad connections, port forwarding details; the truth is it wasn't a great experience, it was simply possible for the vast majority of people to execute, and that was good enough.
it's weird to me you are suggesting Napster was "refined" for it's time, but Apple TV and Chromecast are not currently. it seems like a double standard.
> If someone were to build Popcorn Time as an iPhone or Android app that streams to Chromecast / AppleTV
why does moving Popcorn Time from the desktop iOS environment to the mobile iOS environment suddenly make this more so much more viable? seems like a pretty insignificant detail if you ask me.
Apple TV and Chromecast are refined when playing known-content (from apps). When playing content that is mirrored from a PC there is all sorts of problems. There can often be lag. It eats your PC battery so you have to go find the power supply and find a table to plug in your laptop while you're mirroring.
Can you submit any evidence that a TV is anything more than a bigger computer screen?
My TV has HDMI inputs; if I wanted to move my computer, I could hook my computer up to the TV. Apple has an accessory where the primary selling point (for me) is that it can bounce output from a computer to a TV. There's an entire family of computers where the entire point of them is to be hooked up to TVs and used as media centers.
Saying that popcorn-time isn't napster for movies because people don't watch movies on their computer, they watch them on their tv isn't really different from saying that napster isn't napster for music because people don't listen to music on their computer, they listen to music on their stereo.
> Saying that popcorn-time isn't napster for movies because people don't watch movies on their computer, they watch them on their tv isn't really different from saying that napster isn't napster for music because people don't listen to music on their computer, they listen to music on their stereo.
This was my entire point. People didn't just listen to their Napster-downloaded music on their computer, they listened to them in the car, they brought burnt discs to friends house, etc.
Timing is important. The things you mentioned like Apple TV and HDMI-out are not yet refined. It's not easy, and most importantly, it's not ubiquitous. By the time Napster came out every tower computer came with a CDRW drive.
People don't watch movies in the car, so that part doesn't matter. If you're trying to compare the ease of burning to portable media, tossing an mpeg on a thumb drive is easier and basically as cheap as buying CDs were back in the day. If your only point is that the movie is playing on the screen in the office and not the screen in the living room, I think you're vastly overestimating how much people care but it's not the sort of point I think I can find data to back up, so I'm willing to agree to disagree.
We do have data that says PC sales have been declining for the past several years and are being replaced by tablets. I'd wager that if movies are not being watched on television as much then they're being watched on iPads and other tablets, not laptops. Popcorn Time doesn't run on tablets.
That's actually a good point; tablets have absolutely no utility for me and so I constantly forget that they exist, but lots of people aren't me and apparently think they're pretty great.
If it enables them to watch content, period, people will find a way.
The argument is honestly irrelevant. Popcorn time is a UX leap from what was previously possible. There may be another UX leap in the physical device on which the content is played, but you can't ignore the moon landing just because it didn't happen on Mars.
It's a UX leap, certainly, but Napster was not just a UX leap, it was used by lots of regular people. Is PCT? Even within the subset of users that are torrenting movies, what percentage are doing that through PCT vs. downloading them for later?
If I were a Hollywood exec right now I would be sweating bullets. Steam boxes will be hitting the shelves in the next couple of years and then there will be no stopping hackers from bringing the elegance of Popcorn Time to the comfort of the living room.
It won't be long before any digital content is simply available. It will eventually equilibrate into its natural state: a public good, non-rival and non-exclusive in consumption.
Eventually, we'll pay for our bandwidth and content in one utility package, track usage in a legal and unlimited way, and divvy proceeds of our utility subscription to content creators based on popularity. A systematic solution is necessary, and the faster we're able to do it, the better.
But what is "television"? Isn't it just device, or system where the barrier of entry to access entertainment is sufficiently low for the majority of the population? And if so popcorn time is a giant leap in lowering this barrier of entry on desktops and laptops.
And since in a lot of countries pirated movies are often way quicker than regular distribution, this can really swing people towards PC based "television" or media consumption vs old-time television.
I agree that Popcorn Time is an important milestone, I was disagreeing with the parent who said it was close to being the Napster of movies.
I think people are forgetting just how mainstream Napster was. People are forgetting how common burnt discs were at this time, full of music downloaded from Napster.
It would be great if a developer beyond the reach of the Western legal system would take this project up with a self hosted repo. Code is speech. It's a terrible precedent for devs to be afraid to have code (including me after reading this). This is where the myriad of outdated laws and prosecutorial discretion bites: it's impossible to know where the legal line is.
__
Addition: My view on the savvy modus operandi here (I'm a lawyer when I'm not a developer). If you give someone any kind of reason to sue you, you're essentially handing them a stick. It's much worse if they can afford to hit you with it and you can't afford to defend yourself. The people threatening to sue these guys are almost certainly making silence a condition not to sue. This isolates the devs from people who could support them, and has the added effect of intimidating other devs with the unexplained "disappearances".
There is no western legal system. As absurd as it sounds, what went down with TPB shows how laws perspire beyond a country's boundaries.
As for what actually happened to PT, it isn't as clear-cut as it seems.
I can tell you one thing as food for thought, though. I contributed a minor patch to two forks. I was granted a small amount of dogecoins (about $.10) for one of those contributions. The notion that there would be a remuneration model behind that rather unique type of open-source project tells a lot about how lacking we are. We miss economic models for the free capabilities we build. Things like Gittip only just emerge, but the way they solve the problem of having multiple people be granted a fair share of buying power based on their contributions don't actually rely on a robust mathematical model, and are very probably flawed at scale. That is true of Gittip, it is true of Flattr (notably irrelevant when dealing with a team), it is even true of the Bitcoin ecosystem, given the absence of a proof for the convergence of its volatility.
Those challenges raised by the amazing prospect of a truly decentralized economy are greater than building an app on top of a peer-to-peer network of video distribution. They wouldn't be the first to direct their efforts there, either; a famous TPB member created Flattr after putting his TPB past behind.
PS: on the issue of the struggle for equitable remuneration, here is an outstanding blog post by someone working in a cooperative called Igalia; he did contractor work on V8 and Firefox for Bloomberg: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/25/time-for-money
I was thinking about approximately this just yesterday. I have a banal coding problem that's in the way of what I actually want to do, and would be prepared to pay somebody maybe a hundred bucks to make it go away. Probably there exists a person with the skills and experience to make that happen easily, and for whom that would constitute a non-insulting payment, but I don't know how to find them. There are open source bounty sites, but I doubt I'm going to find the specialist I need on any of them. So instead I'm going to have to spend hours or maybe days learning stuff I would rather not know about.
Edit: If anybody can make this python call to lilv's swig bindings not segfault, I will give them a hundred bucks:
I agree. But where are they going to host it? Maybe you don't get hit with a lawsuit, but your github repo still gets taken down. Set up a hidden service git repo? Does that scale? How do you accept changes? I'm sure people are making and sharing changes privately. Maybe there is a need for better censorship-resistant code collaboration tools? Some kind of peer-to-peer github that works over Tor.
I think everyone who touches it gets a payout. Think about it--legal threats tend to make people angry. Especially anti-intellectual property types. By the odds, shouldn't we be seeing a Streisand effect? Being set for life, though, now that's a good motivator to keep your mouth shut.
An interesting theory, but the problem with it is that the pool of potential devs is effectively limitless (well, not really but it might as well be). They would have to pay me multiple $10ks to stop dev and shut up. And offering that to 100 or 1,000 devs starts getting really expensive. I don't know. Certainly the first few groups it would work, but... if the cat ever got out, everyone would be lining up to develop it, and it would be easy for the cat to get out.
The doctrines underpinning IP law are flimsy and arbitrary. It's normal for technology to change the balance of power (and the laws that enshrine that balance).
In the current environment, Hollywood's business model is unreasonable, and people know it. Until people think it's reasonable, a lot of them are going to pirate. Technology has changed. Hollywood needs to change.
What should be illegal, is threatening to sue someone for working on code with others.
More like a synonym for "rocking the boat." There are legal things that fit the category, as well as illegal things that are not politically agitating (like speeding on a freeway or getting into a fistfight).
1) The software that is included in popcorntime isn't circumventing any rights control measure - the bittorrents that it accesses don't include any rights control measures that would need to be circumvented. The people who originally supplied and seeded those may (or may not) have used some software that circumvents rights control measures, but that's not included in Popcorntime.
2) Circumventing rights control measures is legal in my country and most countries globally. Copyright laws as agreed in Berne conventions and implemented in local legislation simply don't mention such measures and their circumvention in any way, they handle just the copyright part.
USA has a single very specific law - DMCA - that restricts such circumvention; it has been trying to "export" that concept to other countries through trade treaties; but it hasn't succeeded for the most part; making and distributing such tools is legal almost everywhere - and the legality of using them depends on the legality of actual act you're doing; if you're allowed to make that copy (i.e., personal backups) the the use is legal; if you're not (i.e., for redistribution), then the copying is illegal but the 'rights control measure' doesn't change anything at all and its circumvention is irrelevant.
DMCA implements two treaties from WIPO. These were also implemented by the EU as the Copyright Directive. Thus, circumventing a copyright control measure is not legal in some EU countries.
The point is not if what Popcorn Time is doing is illegal, but that there are plenty of well funded lawyers who will take money to make the argument that it is and will happily spend a long time in court arguing that point.
Gagging developers for writing code seems way beyond "legality" to me. They should be able to at least say "I'm being sued for developing Popcorn Time". If your government is gagging you from saying even that...then something has gone terribly wrong somewhere, and yes that does seem like a totalitarian tool when used like that.
There's all manner of totalitarianism-lite in the US. This is not likely one of them. Its a safer bet that this was handled directly by mail/phone/email without involving an actual court. Legal threat under possibly enforceable law does not equal government action. We don't need to blame the government for this to be a bad thing.
Doesn't it seem like TF could simply create their own Repo, build it and start developing on it and see what comes out of the woodwork? Seems like its pretty easy to bait these mysterious forces.
Yes, I was also wondering if FSF or someone like that could take the project themselves. Let's see who comes knocking. It wouldn't be the first time FSF "facilitated piracy" by building tools like that (see GnuNet, Mediagoblin, etc), so I doubt they would be too afraid to try it.
I don't think the industry is silencing them. I think the original devs have gotten scared of being sued and have quickly dropped the project and severed all connections with it.
What would happen if suddenly, a very big number of developers (I really mean it... like thousands of developers) began to contribute to such a project. Would hollywood start to sue everyone? And what if some of them would be some "rockstar developers" (like very important for the software world)... yeah... I'm just dreaming, but it would be like the equivalent to a mass protest, that they just wouldn't be able to handle.
It's an existential threat to Hollywood's current business models. They would sue a very big number of developers. Most of whom would fold about 30 seconds after getting the legal paperwork.
The few who remained would get crushed. Viacom's YouTube suit ran for 7 years before settlement. And Hollywood is practiced at fucking with the little people; you can see Buchwald v Paramount for an example of how they operate, and one of the rare times they lost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchwald_v._Paramount
I've been thinking, one should find some mortally ill people in whose name one sets up the repository and website (or just a straight site where you can download all the movies). In exchange one secretly pays their family enough in cash or bitcoin that they don't ever have to worry about money again.
If I were filthy rich and had more criminal intentions, I would totally do that ;-)
They're being paid off, with silence a condition of the agreement. Seems like the smart thing to do would be to start a new fork and wait for the lawyer and suspiciously well-muscled paralegal with the inexplicable tire iron to arrive on your doorstep. Then take the money. Don't negotiate, just take the money.
If people were uploading copyrighted material, then Github would be obliged to honor takedown notices. But here, the code's under some sort of public license, so the takedown process wouldn't apply.
Im not sure how liberal Github is with banning project but I think a possible reason would be they don't want to terminate a project until they get a court order.
This seems like the more straightforward way to try to kill the project: get Github to stop hosting it. You'd think with the right team of lawyers this would be do-able. There must be something interesting them preventing them from doing this, surely it'd be cheaper than dealing with developers one at a time.
In the meantime, Popcorn Time is fully available to download. So I'm not sure what genie they're putting back in the bottle....