Andy Greenberg did a story on Wired that was a great read for those interested in the intellectual property battles around the Internet when it comes to piracy and how each side plays the game.
The article centers around Popcorn Time and Greenberg interviewed one of the programmers under an alias. The programmer discussed how they are looking to go p2p so that no matter how many domains are suspended it won’t matter. These guys so far are not making any money they seem to be doing it for the admiration of their users and believe what they are doing is not illegal.
From the article:
The video streaming service made BitTorrent piracy as easy as Netflix, but with far more content and none of those pesky monthly payments. Hollywood quickly intervened, pressuring Popcorn Time’s Argentinian developers to walk away from their creation. But anonymous coders soon relaunched the copyright-flouting software. Today, Popcorn Time is growing at a rate that has likely surpassed the original, and the people behind it say they’re working on changes designed to make the service virtually impervious to law enforcement.
Popcorn Time isn’t a new kind of piracy so much as an inviting new front-end interface for the BitTorrent underground. The software collects and organizes popular files from existing BitTorrent sources like the Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, Isohunt, and YTS. “We’re like Google,” Pochoclin says, “scraping for new content all over the internet.”
On the matter of whether it is illegal, the article continued:
Pochoclin says the service doesn’t do anything illegal: It merely organizes preexisting BitTorrent files hosted on other sites. “It’s all automated and all working on existing open source technologies and existing websites online. Therefore, it’s legal. Or better … not illegal,” Pochoclin says. “We all live in a free society, where what is not forbidden is allowed.”
Read the full article on Wired
R. E. = ” “We’re like Google,” Pochoclin says, “scraping for new content all over the internet.”
To come out and say that your company is legit, because its just like Google, is a tip off that your company is up to No Good. We suggest Pochoclin takes a look under the hood at Googles nefarious involvement of DNS Nuetrality Subversion. The International Watchdog for Anti-Competition Practices is watching. Googles head leaving office recently may be a sign of lots of heat on Googles Anti-Competive Practices.
Governments will just make is increasingly difficult to find a no-log, no-trace, no-history fully encrypted end to end proxy/VPN that accepts anonymous non-fiat currency. Then if there is no controlling entry that is accessible then we can just expect continuing lawsuits to the users who don’t protect themselves fully.
In the end the legal options can only truly beat piracy if they up their game and become better. – I’m looking forward to what the future has to bring.
I hope the revolution will be like what we’ve seen in the music industry. A decade ago there was a lot of illegal mp3 downloading taking place but it seems that the development of music streaming services like Spotify, Deezer, YouTube etc. have reduced music-pirates to a very small group. This hasn’t happened because of legislation or technical countermeasures but because those services became so good in terms of selection, functions, pricing etc. that many just didn’t want to deal with the trouble of illegal downloads.