
GitHub reinstates Popcorn Time code - throwaway888abc
https://torrentfreak.com/github-reinstates-popcorn-time-code-despite-mpa-threat-200520/
======
toyg
The funny thing is that the MPAA are so clueless, they don’t even know
popcorntime are their own worst enemies. They kept splitting out, rewriting
from scratch, failing to establish a trusted way of distributing the app, then
the latest releases have been so bad that people are abandoning it in droves -
you can see the fallout on reddit. The ban was meant to DOS them for a few
weeks, now that cinemas are shut and all eyes are on digital, but ended up
being a big advertising campaign for PT. Good on the lawyers for getting paid
to fail!

PT itself is a relatively banal app anyway, even if it gets nuked someone else
will rewrite it. Napster begat Gnutella begat BitTorrent begat Popcorn, it
will not end until the movie business gives consumers what they want: a cheap
global service to watch anything anytime.

~~~
js2
Tonight I wanted to watch _Spider-Man: Far From Home_ with my kids. I have
subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Criterion, Apple TV+ and PBS.
Yet, my only option was to purchase it digitally via iTunes for $15. There was
no rental option. It wasn’t available in Disney+ because I assume Sony holds
the rights despite the rest of Marvel belonging to Disney. It’s only available
for purchase and not rental because I assume: greed.

So I downloaded it off Usenet instead.

Edit: Starz apparently has distribution rights at the moment. 7 days free then
$8.99/month. So I could’ve legally watched it for free by signing up via Apple
and canceling. Sigh. This is exhausting Hollywood. Get your shit together.

~~~
akerro
>I have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Criterion, Apple TV+
and PBS

WOW. I had netflix once for a few days, I paid for netflix just to watch House
MD, a week into netflix, they removed House MD from my region, I cancelled
subscription and moved to PT. Never came back to netflix, I just no longer
trust them, too much effort and too much legal complications. I can imagine
paying for one portal, but more than two? That's more expensive and less user
friendly then cable TV.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
ok not trusting them seems a little much on that example, surely they didn't
promise you that House MD would be on in your region in perpetuity? Although
there are probably lots other reasons not to trust them.

~~~
jstanley
Why wouldn't it be there?

Netflix have the data, he has the money, what's the problem?

The problem is "too much legal complications" and that problem does not exist
on Popcorn Time.

~~~
m4rtink
Yeah, this really looks to me like someone still clinking to the long obsolete
broadcast model, where you had no back channel to your customers from them to
request what they want & to pay for it. And also broadcasts were regionally
bound.

So you sold a license to a local broadcasting company to for a time window and
number of runs for a show. Not more you can do with no back channel for
customers to request individual shows and pay for them. By only granting one
license per are you can enforce some scarcity and get your money & hopefully
users liked it. Channels could the compete who gets the best time based
licenses, who gets the new hot stuff first, etc.

Now here we are with a global network with basically any user being able to
request any show and pay for it (or get a subscription for a channel carrying
it) and yet the media companies still carry one like one had to win an auction
to get one of the broadcast masters, drag in on top of a hill to broadcast it
and then return it back to someone else to do the same thing.

------
ezoe
I don't get it. The No.1 copyright infringement tool is undoubtedly the most
popular web browser, whichever that is.

~~~
chii
The browser have other, legitimate uses. Popcorntime pretty much has no other
legitimate use other than as a tool for copyright infringement.

~~~
fulafel
I think it's still quite far from having no legitimate uses:

The app is for watching movies. there are lots of movies that are legal to
distribute this way for anybody. And people could have rights to copy specific
films from other routes. Copyright terms (if they exist) vary by jurisdiction,
some countries have eg 25 years from date of production for movies.

~~~
oefrha
Popcorn Time != BitTorrent, though. The way Popcorn Time and other BT
streaming clients does torrenting is pretty bad for the the overall swarm
health — everyone is seeding and leeching the beginning but availability
deteriorates the deeper you go. My BT client of choice, Transmission,
explicitly rejected the idea of getting chunks sequentially (you have to patch
the source yourself if you really want to do that). So, if you can, contribute
to swarm health by downloading with a traditional client upfront. And seed to
a reasonable ratio, of course.

~~~
londons_explore
With far more people's download speed being much higher than the data rate of
the content, this matters far less. Sure, you are downloading _some_ blocks
from the start of the file, but you are also getting blocks from the middle
and end of the file at the same time, which you can exchange with other users
tit for tat.

Also, the benefits of tit for tat sharing to prevent Leachers are also less
important - with more people having faster internet, there isnt anymore the
"everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload"
issue.

~~~
oefrha
With the exception of popular torrents (where swarm health is usually a non-
issue), most of the time download speed is limited by the number of seeders
and their upload speeds, not the leechers’ download speeds. The problem arises
when all leechers request the beginning of an old and/or obscure torrent from
one or few leechers.

> there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be
> bothered to upload" issue.

There’s the “people quit their BT client as soon as they finish their
download” problem which faster internet doesn’t solve.

~~~
yurishimo
Are there any VPNs that support the throughput speeds many consumers have
access to these days? I have my client set to a 10:1 ratio, but rarely will a
file actually reach that because I don't want to leave my slow VPN online for
that long degrading my performance for other online tasks.

~~~
oefrha
I've used commercial VPN with acceptable (think ~100Mbps) but not amazing
throughput.

But for BT I just set up a secondary on-demand network interface on my Linux
server specifically for OpenVPN (just need a shell script to add a couple
ip(8) rules, and stick that shell script into the up command of ovpn config).
Then I bind my transmission-daemon to that specific interface (bind-address-
ipv4 option). This way all BT traffic goes through OpenVPN, but other traffic
is not affected. Works for any OpenVPN provider.

~~~
bavell
This sounds fantastic, thanks for the idea and explanation!

------
parliament32
The funny thing about the streaming wars is that the music services somehow
figured it out. I can pay for Google Play / Spotify / Apple Music and get
literally all the music, for a single fee, from the same place. No content
appearing/disappearing, no regional BS, no outrageous fees, it just works.
Music piracy has basically died over the last few years cause of this -- I
can't remember the last time I wanted to listen to something that I had to
pirate.

What's so different about TV/movies?

~~~
rajnathani
Movies are at least one to two orders of magnitude more expensive to make than
entire music albums.

~~~
parliament32
So what? The number of albums available to stream is a few orders of magnitude
higher than the number of shows/movies available.

~~~
rajnathani
It matters as the total budget of a movie needs to be recouped. The vast
majority of albums are likely made using a few thousand dollars [0], if there
isn't a break-even the artists potentially have other avenues of making money
such as gigs/concerts if not making the limelight in the future.

Movies such as that of the Mission Impossible series and the Avengers series
cost $150M-$350M per movie to make [1] [2], without a theatrical release
and/or a temporary pay-per-view model via Apple Movies or Amazon Prime (or
most of the world being on a $20-30+/month Netflix, Disney Plus, etc.
subscription, which is not the case yet), there wouldn't be much interest in
financing such movies.

[0] [https://sonicscoop.com/2017/05/25/budget-record-
album-2017/](https://sonicscoop.com/2017/05/25/budget-record-album-2017/)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%E2%80%93_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%E2%80%93_Fallout)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers:_Endgame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers:_Endgame)

------
leed25d
The Hydra will just grow more heads. Hasn't the MPA figured this out yet?

~~~
Polylactic_acid
The most puzzling thing is they already beat piracy with netflix but now they
are trying to kill the convenience by splitting content over 20 platforms
causing piracy to come back.

~~~
waheoo
Beat piracy?

Lol. Netflix is a joke, every time i sign up again I find it lacking tonnes of
content.

It optimizes for flicking through its catalog so nobody notices its missing
nearly everything.

It does this to wear you down into submission watching or rewatching some old
crap.

I went to watch the last season of the 100 before the new release, found its
catalog is two seasons behind. Its a mess.

~~~
ojosilva
Netflix is "TV, evolved" \- including cable TV. It's not comparable to Spotify
or iTunes ("CD, evolved"), which made music piracy almost irrelevant with
their very comprehensive catalogs.

Netflix content beats many open TV channels in my area, at least in the
fiction and documentary arenas. And like some TV/cable networks do, Netflix
invests heavily in producing their own content. It's just a matter of time
until they figure out how/if/when they will launch a TV-like continuous stream
of content that includes news, weather, sports, gameshows, realities... And
add more focus on "live" and sell differentiated content packages by user
taste.

~~~
Krasnol
I'm lucky to live in a country with a wide public broadcasting network
(Germany). So I'm pretty sure that if Netflix comes up with a linear stream, I
won't come back anymore. That split of content killed it for me and at this
point streaming or 1-click hosters work well enough for the selected content I
need. For everything else I have our public broadcasting network.

~~~
ojosilva
If they implement some continuous streaming (a hunch of mine), it would be
just another box in your Netflix home grid.

Click on it for autoplay to start and watch a bundled playlist of current
(random) content or, if they decide to dig into it: news, weather, sports etc.

------
DethNinja
This is why we need a p2p git storage. I wonder if IPFS can handle this.

~~~
Doxin
Git already _is_ p2p. The whole centralized-git-through-github-or-whatnot is a
fairly recent invention. Originally you'd pull directly from other developers
repositories. The role of PR was fulfilled by emailing patchsets around.

All github does is provide convenience. If you want to use github in a peer-
to-peer fashion all the tools are already there.

~~~
YetAnotherNick
Stop inventing stories. How do I pull from developer's repo? Don't say every
author will need to host some server with ssh. Imagine the rate at which
unmaintained repos will become unavailable.

~~~
wyattpeak
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Yes, maintainers had to host
servers. Yes, unmaintained repos disappeared.

~~~
Sir_Substance
That also depended on the project. With the right ports forwarded on your home
router, servers can pop up and down as required.

Mercurial had a single command for this, "hg serve", that would just pop up a
webserver for sharing. It was extremely useful for me during university, and
I've often considered it a key failing that git does not provide a similar
command out of the box. As a result, the distributed nature of git is hidden
from a lot of people.

For the record, the command to make git do what mercurial does with hg serve
is "git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=. --export-all --verbose
--enable=receive-pack".

Obviously this is insecure and anyone who can establish a connection can push
and pull from your repo, but if you're just jamming with some friends you
don't need github.

------
Paperweight
I used to help out a video rental store, which closed this month. I made them
a mail-order rental catalogue
([https://rent.leosvideos.ca/](https://rent.leosvideos.ca/)) and looked into
this whole fiasco.

When you buy a DVD, you can rent it to others without a license. Physical
ownership.

When you buy a digital file, you're not allowed to rent it out to others
without a license. Digital non-ownership. But you have the bits - that's
physical ownership.

People want "one place to rent movies" but that will never work. They'd be a
middleman monopoly between you and the studios - and middleman monopolies
always turn out bad.

In my opinion, there is a "free market" system that the invisible hand wants,
which is a digital analogue of what we had with physical distribution, that
reconciles the fact that a digital file really is a (virtual) physical object
(on a hard drive), and nothing else will work:

You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.

Result: There would be multiple online streaming rental stores that have huge
catalogues of whatever you want.

Speculation: Everyone would just use those. Studios would raise the prices for
digital files to $10k+ because they know it will be rented out. The total
sales of units would amount to the high water mark of the number of people who
want to watch a file at the same time.

We'd have a rich market where there are multiple players in each layer.

~~~
diegoperini
> You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.

This can never happen but only simulated, up to a point. Copying physical
objects requires manufacture work, copying data is essentially free if you
neglect the transmission costs. Whatever paradigm digital ownership adopts
will not resemble the physical world renting mechanism.

I used your sentence as a straw-man, please forgive me. :)

~~~
Paperweight
I'd say the unit cost of running a proper streaming-rental service is about
the same as burning a copy of a DVD (20 cents per movie). There's way more to
it than just bandwidth.

Sure you could still pirate (just like you could copy DVDs) but if the path of
least resistance (factoring in quality, legal and moral costs) is to just rent
it legitimately then that's what people would do. Video stores could have just
copied DVDs and the studios were very afraid of DVD-Rs when they came out, but
that didn't pan out because it's obviously illegal and immoral.

There _was_ a company in California in the early days that had actual people
putting actual DVDs into actual DVD players that would stream on demand across
the internet, but they folded when they got a legal threat. It might be
legally OK - I don't think it's ever been tested in court.

------
swiley
It makes sense. If GitHub ever became like YouTube instead of a “dumb pipe”
there would be a mass exodus. Right now they hold canonical copies of the law
in some places [0] and are owned by Microsoft so most people (me included) are
ready to flip out if they do something awful.

[0][https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc-law-html](https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc-
law-html)

------
mixmastamyk
I had popcorn time installed for a while, but it kept running services in the
background and spamming notifications, even when I killed them. After a few
days of that I uninstalled it.

~~~
thekyle
I don't know which platform you used it on but I've found the Windows version
to be quite unstable. IMO the Linux version runs much better.

~~~
mixmastamyk
It was Android.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Long press any notification and ban the app.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Thanks, although I was really trying to stop the service from doing things
behind my back in general.

------
rolph
cloned em all

[https://github.com/popcorn-official](https://github.com/popcorn-official)

~~~
fmakunbound
Even [https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-
app](https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-app) ? That one seems to be
missing with nothing but a bullshit DMCA notice in its place.

------
teruakohatu
Funnily enough I was watching a YouTube video, or live stream, by popular
artist Lost Frequencies in which he showed and explained how he remixed a
song. Popcorn Time was prominently displayed in his Dock.

------
RMPR
Just like I said on Reddit.

>According to the MPA, the application includes links to pirate sites, pirate
APIs, and pirate torrent trackers, which are used to download pirated movies
and TV-shows.

Laughing in Awesome Piracy[0]

0: [https://github.com/Igglybuff/awesome-
piracy](https://github.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy)

------
black_puppydog
So, given how very p2p git is and all, where are all the hackers here willing
to stick out their neck and actually share urls where a user would find
popcorn-app now?

^-- that's a very sarcastic way to say: yes, git the protocol may be
decentralized, but git the (distribution) ecosystem is not and was not ever
really censorship resistant beyond "I can keep what I have and share it in a
small circle"

------
thrownaway954
I don't get why people would use something like popcorntime which by using you
are almost guaranteed a lovely letter from your ISP (especially Comcast) when
there are numerous movies sites you can go to _cough_ cineb _cough_ and watch
whatever you want through a browser and not BitTorrent. It's the BitTorrent
aspect of popcorntime that gets you flagged. Why take the risk using it?

~~~
cronix
Ah yes, those "nasty" emails saying they can cut my service that I've been
receiving weekly for about over 10 years now. They have your browsing history
too, you know. It's not like you're not leaving a trail watching movies on
pirate websites. I don't use popcorntime, but use bittorrent quite a bit. My
guess on why they haven't cut my service is possibly that I live in an area
with quite a few ISP's, so they know I'll just go to a competitor and they'd
rather just send me automated form emails to claim they "did something" and
keep the cash.

------
Twirrim
Note: This is the company that now owns NPM. You can/should expect the same
take-down standards to apply to code hosted there.

If you weren't already, I'd strongly encourage having some kind of caching
proxy between you and the NPM repositories, just to ensure that some kind of
takedown action won't screw up your builds.

~~~
speedgoose
The risk is low for most dependencies. They have experienced the left-pad
drama. I would rather have to fix my dependencies and have broken builds for a
short while than having to maintain a npm cache.

------
villgax
Time to fix that ESP stuck inside the Casio calculator as well

------
guscost
This is one of those times where it’s a _good_ thing that GitHub got bought by
the biggest company in the world.

------
bawolff
This feels a little sensationalized. This is just how dmca work. Party 1 files
a notice, party 2 files a counter notice, party 1 either puts up or shuts up.
The article makes it sound like github is picking sides, where really they are
just not getting in the middle of the fight.

~~~
jdsully
This is far from how it should work. The MPAA needed to certify a good faith
belief the code was infringing. There is no reasonable way they could believe
that the code itself was infringing on their copyrights.

The fact they had no concern at all filing a frivolous take-down request shows
how broken the DMCA checks and balances are. This is a long standing problem
[1]

[1] [https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/media-entertainment-
law/...](https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/media-entertainment-
law/30865/good-faith-belief-in-dmca-notice-and-takedown-provisions-requires-
subjective-standard)

~~~
colejohnson66
I don’t agree with what the MPAA did, but they didn’t claim the code was
infringing on their rights. They claimed the code facilitated infringement,
which is also not allowed under the DMCA.

~~~
henriquez
It’s _arguably_ not allowed by the DMCA, but outside the scope of the notice-
and-takedown provisions which only provide for takedown of specific infringing
works. Statutory infringements outside of that very narrow scope would require
a traditional lawsuit with actual court oversight.

MPAA is not stupid and they knowingly abused the process in this case because
they wanted to put Microsoft in a tight situation and gauge their response. Of
course it went exactly as planned with Microsoft rolling over like every other
tech company that won’t stand up for its users’ rights.

This is _exactly_ why we need decentralized P2P tech btw.

~~~
colejohnson66
From the takedown request:

> Moreover, the Project in question hosts software that is distributed and
> used to infringe on the MPA Member Studios’ copyrights. See Metro-Goldwyn-
> Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 940 n.13 (2005) (‘the
> distribution of a product can itself give rise to liability where evidence
> shows that the distributor intended and encouraged the product to be used to
> infringe’)

I agree though, they went around the courts with a DMCA takedown, and
should’ve sued.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_Ltd).

~~~
henriquez
The fact that the software could be used for infringement is irrelevant
because the software itself is not infringing (someone else brought up web
browsers as another example of this).

The MPAA are legally savvy enough to know this was an abuse of process. If any
DMCA reforms are needed, top of my list would be removing takedown privileges
from copyright holders that abuse it.

~~~
YetAnotherNick
I wonder if you had say said same with a website that does not ban child porn
or somehow encouraged paedophilia or let users discuss black lynching in
public forum. I know they are extreme examples but sometimes the blanket
statement like 'software itself is not infringing' should be used with more
caution.

In popcorn time's I support it to be back but this does not mean I support
fully uncensored net.

~~~
jdsully
If laws are regularly abused for extraneous purposes then we no longer live in
a society with rule of law. Armed gangs are replaced by teams of lawyers but
the effect is the same.

There may be value in taking down tools used to aid copyright but if that is a
desired outcome congress should pass a law permitting it.

------
michaelmior
I always find it interesting that inconvenience is seen as a justification for
stealing. Although I did this myself for many years, so I guess I do get it
after all. However, I think now in the age of Netflix and Hulu, I can get the
majority of what I want at a reasonable price.

~~~
aflag
I think calling copyright infringement stealing is a hyperbole. They are very
different things. Sometimes it's more than an inconvenience, though. At the
present moment in time, I have no way to legally watch all but 3 Rick and
Morty's episodes from the latest season (episodes 6, 7 and 8). And that's a
brand new show. Don't get me started on older movies/tv shows.

We have the technology to allow everyone to have access to any film produced
that we still have available in some format, but the distributors/copyright
holders just can't organise themselves to make this happen, but instead give
us a broken experience. I see projects like popcorn time pushing the
boundaries a little bit, trying to make the problem evident.

I, for one, would like to see the copyright law reviewed. It could require you
to pay part of the profits from the derivative work to copyright holders, but
not give the copyright holder the power to prevent you from distributing it,
for instance. That could would allow netflix, apple tv, etc to have pretty
much whatever they wanted in their collection.

~~~
hashkb
How do you figure you're entitled to watch everything that's ever been
released? There's no precedent for that. Even taping with a VCR was in the
gray area. You had to buy every movie individually, and that was really just a
personal viewing license.

~~~
qntty
How do you figure that media companies are entitled to wield the power of the
state in a way that doesn't create an institution of intellectual property
that makes the world better for everyone?

~~~
hashkb
It's not the power of the state, it's the power of a private entertainment
business. You could choose to only watch open/free media like many of us do
with software. It's out there.

> in a way that doesn't create an institution of intellectual property that
> makes the world better for everyone?

That question is loaded with your opinion (in particular the opinion I was
suggesting is baseless) and so isn't really an answer at all... you want the
world your way, I'm asking, beyond your opinion that it's "better for
everyone" (ignoring artists, I guess), why you seem to think there's an issue
of right/wrong here.

~~~
qntty
Intellectual property exists as it does because it was created that way by the
state.

~~~
hashkb
But you can't just ignore the reason... and "the state" created ways to
protect intellectual property (at least in some significant part if not
entirely) because creators wanted it. You can't ignore the fact that most
creators are in favor of the general idea of copyright.

------
getcrunk
Wow. I'm done with GitHub. This is a vulnerability afaic. Just going to
dissapear my code base huh.

~~~
colejohnson66
It’s not GitHub’s fault the DMCA exists

~~~
getcrunk
Yea but it is their fault for how they handled it.

They could have froze and privated the repo and investigated the issue.

This isn't the same as a pirated move or song on YouTube. This is code. And
version control or code repos are very important.

~~~
labster
No, really, they have to wait for the counter notice or they are liable too.
I’m sure MPAA would love to sue a billion dollar company and not just random
people on the net.

~~~
getcrunk
As another commenter pointed out since it wasnt infringing directly (code
wasn't infringing copyrighted code) it actually does not fall under that
constraint.

Even if I'm wrong, this is a valid way to dos my repo. Like when it happens on
YouTube people loose money right and that's some people's main income. This
can be even worse.

~~~
odensc
How almost every service provider reacts to DMCA notices is by taking down the
content ASAP, and if they receive a counter-notice, putting it back up after 2
weeks. They do not make any decisions on whether the content is actually
infringing or not. By doing that, they make themselves liable if it actually
is copyright-infringing material.

If you aren't okay with that, use a service provider in a jurisdiction not
governed by DMCA laws, or run your own service provider and take on that
liability yourself.

