The Hollywood group had filed a lawsuit against several of the developers in Canada which caused other key developers to back out.
While the MPAA’s actions had a profound impact, it didn’t stop others from continuing with their own Popcorn Time spin-offs. The popular Popcorn-time.se fork was unharmed and most recently a new group of developers launched a Popcorn Time Community Edition (PTCE).
The people behind PTCE began their work with a fully operational fix for the .io fork which was circulated on Reddit. Later they also added their own fork and a dedicated website at Popcorntime.ml.
“Popcorn Time will probably never go away, despite the efforts made by organizations such as BREIN, the MPAA and others. Instead of fighting this great software they should embrace it,” the PTCE team told TF at the time.
The new fork was welcomed by many estranged Popcorn Time users and quickly gained a healthy userbase. However, two days ago the project’s official website and GitHub repository went dark.
At first it was unclear what had happened but an insider informs TF that several people involved with the PTCE project are “getting bugged” by the MPAA.
“The people behind the official CE sites have been contacted by MPAA for some time now,” says Luretrix2k, who’s a moderator at the Popcorn Time subreddit.
“They decided to take everything down and start all over again with a new strategy/game plan for the official site and GitHub repository to avoid this problem in the future,” he adds.
The PTCE team doesn’t want anyone to get in trouble with the law and are figuring out what steps they can take to avoid this. They hope to get the site back up again in the future and will continue to work on the application behind the scenes.
The MPAA pressure shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the lawsuit against the developers of the popular .io fork. Also, two PTCE developers had to quit the project last month after they were targeted by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN.
Even if the Community Edition doesn’t come back, others may jump in to take its place. Rinse and repeat.
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