Through various enforcement actions around the world the major movie studios hope to eventually contain this threat.
They recently booked a major victory when the MPAA filed a lawsuit against several key developers of the popular popcorntime.io fork in Canada. While this suit took down the associated website, there are several efforts to revive the project.
The problem for the movie studios is that Popcorn Time’s code is open source, allowing anyone to help out or distribute forks of their own. With minimal effort, developers can easily have their own improved version up and running.
While this results in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group BREIN has just announced a win.
The group reports that has tracked down two Dutch developers who helped to keep Popcorn Time alive, and urged them to stop their activities immediately.
“Since the recent action by the MPAA against popcorntime.io, which took the website offline, various parties are breathing new life into the software, as were these two Dutch individuals,” the group says.
According to BREIN the pair used GitHub to submit code and Reddit to share news about their accomplishments.
Preventing a possible court case, the developers signed a settlement with the anti-piracy group in which they agreed to stop their Popcorn Time development. The pair face a fine of €2,000 per day if they breach the agreement.
The Dutch developers don’t seem to be part of the core development team of the .io fork, which could explain why they got off with a relatively mild warning.
The lawsuit against three of the main popcorntime.io developers in Canada is still ongoing. They face millions in damages due to their involvement with the popular application and the associated VPN.ht service, which generated significant revenues.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
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