GitHub repository of the open project Popcorn Time after receipt from the Motion Picture Association (MPA, Inc.), which represents the interests of the largest television studios in the United States and has exclusive rights to show many films and television shows. A US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) infringement claim was used to block. Program provides a convenient interface for searching and watching streaming video hosted on various BitTorrent networks without waiting for it to be fully downloaded to your computer (in fact, this is an open BitTorrent client with a built-in multimedia player).
The Association of motion picture companies demanded to block the repositories ΠΈ , justifying this by the fact that the development and use of software developed in these repositories leads to copyright infringement on films and television programs. It is alleged that the files and code identified in the repository are specifically used to find and obtain pirated copies of films and TV shows, which violates copyright law.
In particular, in some files supplied with the project (, ,, ), there are links to pirate sites and torrent trackers that provide access to unlicensed copies of films. The project also uses APIs provided by similar sites to provide access to counterfeit content from the Popcorn Time app.
Interestingly, in 2014 the MPA already an attempt to block Popcorn Time on GitHub under the pretext that the program was specifically designed to access pirated copies of movies and series. At that moment, the repositories were blocked ,
ΠΈ . The MPA also forced the developers to stop development under threat of legal claims and they officially announced the closure of the project, but anonymously revived the project in the form of a fork of popcorntime.io (the creators of the original Popcorn Time clearly did not associate themselves with popcorntime.io, but stated that they considered it the successor to the project). Forks have also been launched by various teams around the world.
In 2015 MPA through the courts of Canada and New Zealand stopping popcorntime.io and transferring the domain to the MPA, but the developers moved the project to the popcorntime.sh domain. The MPA won a court order in the UK and Israel for ISPs to block access to URLs for downloading Popcorn Time. In Denmark, the site popcorntime.dk was closed and its creators were arrested, but it turned out that they were not related to the developers and only provided information about the service. Popcorn-Time.no domain removed in Norway for providing download links
Popcorn Time. Numerous Popcorn Time users from Germany have been sued for β¬815 for damages resulting from not only viewing but also distributing illegal content (involved as participants in BitTorrent giveaways).
Source: opennet.ru