MPAA wins court injunction to shut Popcorn Time streaming site
The Motion Picture Association of America has managed to temporarily shut down the most popular version of Popcorn Time, a Canadian-made web service that allows users to watch movies and television shows online by taking files known as torrents and arranging them in a user-friendly way.
On Tuesday, the group that represents all the major Hollywood studios revealed that it is behind an October court ruling from the Federal Court of Canada that took the most popular version of the service, Popcorntime.io, offline.
Other versions of the streaming service — dubbed "the Netflix of piracy" because it removes the need to understand complicated and rapidly changing downloadable file formats — still exist for now.
"Once users have downloaded and installed Popcorn Time, they can easily navigate through a polished and user-friendly interface to simply search for the motion picture they want to watch, after which they can click on the image of a poster corresponding to that motion picture and click the 'watch now' button," the studios' statement of claim reads.
"The motion picture will then start playing almost instantly, on an on-demand basis, and in a manner akin to broadcasting, the whole without payment by the user."
Long battle
Though other versions of the service remain available, the version shuttered since the court injunction was granted Oct. 16 was by far the most popular, and in its court filing, the MPAA cited three Canadians — David Lemarier, Robert English and Louie Poole — for "developing, operating, distributing and promoting" the service since April 2014.
The streaming service had more than 1.5 million users in July 2015, the injunction reads.
The MPAA is requesting unspecified damages for illegal streaming in its statement of claim against Lemarier, English and Poole, and the court ruling on the injunction demands co-operation from them in assisting forensic experts to access Popcorn Time servers for all known domains and subdomains to get them deactivated.
"This co-ordinated legal action is part of a larger comprehensive approach being taken by the MPAA and its international affiliates to combat content theft," said the MPAA's chair, Chris Dodd.
"By shutting down these illegal commercial enterprises, which operate on a massive global scale, we are protecting not only our members' creative work and the hundreds of innovative, legal digital distribution platforms, but also the millions of people whose jobs depend on a vibrant motion picture and television industry."
MPAA is claiming victory and talking tough about cracking down on other services, but at least one technology watcher says the issue is a long way from being solved.
"It seems like whack-a-mole to me," said David Silverberg, editor-in-chief of DigitalJournal.com "There's just so many of these websites around."
Silverberg says the movie business is trying to learn lessons from the music business, which fought many battles against companies like Napster and Limewire over the past 20 years, and managed for the most part to marginalize them while getting a critical mass of consumers to switch to paid digital music subscriptions.
"Both industries are freaking out," he said. "Music freaked out and lawyered up and had big names like Metallica to give their fight a celebrity appeal." The movie business is currently doing the same, getting Hollywood actors to appear in pre-roll ads at movie theatres, telling viewers that piracy doesn't just hurt them it hurts lower end people like technicians and grips on movie sets.
"The music industry realized they had to come up with changes to go digital and it's the same thing for movies," he said.
The bottom line, Silverberg says, is that the battle may be won, but the war is likely far from over.
To any users of the service or similar ones, his message is simple: "Enjoy it while it lasts because it might be gone tomorrow [but] it's a tough war to win for either side."
