But he's made some powerful enemies.Popcorn Time was once a very popular apps for streaming movies and TV shows, but was shut down in 2022. With Popcorn Time's popularity skyrocketing, it may soon find out whether those defenses are good enough to hold off a horde of MPAA lawyers, too. But they're not supposed to give our information out to anyone. "We guess our hosting company does know who we are. "We're anonymous but not in hiding," Pochoclin says. The Swedish founders of the Pirate Bay, for instance, were successfully prosecuted for running the massively popular BitTorrent website, and the United States is seeking the extradition of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom from New Zealand to face criminal copyright infringement charges.įor now, Popcorn Time's developers depend on their unnamed web hosting company to ensure their anonymity, which is hardly a bulletproof strategy. When those updates are in place, Pochoclin says, "only our users will decide whether we live or die … This way, Popcorn Time will be unstoppable."īut even if the service itself does develop an invincible peer-to-peer architecture, Popcorn Time's developers may be personally vulnerable to a lawsuit or even criminal charges. In a second upcoming phase, says it will have the ability to update the app itself via peer-to-peer downloads, using cryptographic signatures to ensure no malicious code propagates through its network. That means that even if its domain or other central infrastructure is taken down, Popcorn Time would still function. In about a month, the group says it plans to launch a version of the app that will update its TV and movie content with the same peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol that it uses to stream movies, pulling data from other users rather than a central server. With legal threats looming, is working on new defenses. "If they know that they're actually facilitating the downloading or streaming of copyrighted movies and they continue to do it, they’re in trouble," Gibson says. A service whose primary, intended function is aiding copyright infringement doesn't need to host any files to be illegal. Even though it merely helps users stream video files made available elsewhere, Popcorn Time could be accused of "contributory liability," says University of Richmond intellectual property law professor Jim Gibson. An MPAA spokesperson pointed out in an email to WIRED that previous software like Napster, Grokster, isoHunt, and Limewire didn't directly host content either, but courts ruled that all of them were infringing on copyrights. That's not a defense that's likely to succeed in an American court. "We all live in a free society, where what is not forbidden is allowed." Or better … not illegal," Pochoclin says. "It's all automated and all working on existing open source technologies and existing websites online. Pochoclin says the service doesn't do anything illegal: It merely organizes preexisting BitTorrent files hosted on other sites. In a January 20 letter to shareholders, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote that "piracy continues to be one of our biggest competitors," and referred to Popcorn Time by name, calling a graph showing its rising Google searches "sobering." Neither Netflix nor Hulu responded to WIRED's requests for comment. The MPAA declined to comment on any measures it's taking against the new Popcorn Time. Documents revealed in last year’s Sony hack revealed that the Motion Picture Association of America boasted of a "major victory" in pressuring Popcorn Time’s original developers to scupper the service. That road, it seems, points toward a collision course with the Hollywood's copyright lawyers. (The anonymous developer asked us to use Popcorn Time's smiling popcorn-box mascot "Pochoclin" as his or her pseudonym.) Popcorn Time's masked spokesperson says the streaming movie and TV app is flourishing-in defiance of many of the world's most powerful copyright holders and EURid, the domain registrar that seized the original site's web domain last year. Today, Popcorn Time is growing at a rate that has likely surpassed the original, and the people behind it say they're working on changes designed to make the service virtually impervious to law enforcement.Īs Popcorn Time celebrated the first anniversary of its rebirth, WIRED chatted via email and instant message with a software developer from, one of the most popular of several reincarnations of Popcorn Time. But anonymous coders soon relaunched the copyright-flouting software. Hollywood quickly intervened, pressuring Popcorn Time's Argentinian developers to walk away from their creation. Popcorn Time was an instant hit when it launched just over a year ago: The video streaming service made BitTorrent piracy as easy as Netflix, but with far more content and none of those pesky monthly payments.
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