Branded a “Netflix for Pirates,” the Popcorn Time app quickly gathered a user base of millions of people over the past year.
There are several successful forks of the application available online who all work on their own feature sets.
Popcorn-time.se, has been one of the most active projects. The fork added numerous features and made privacy one of its key selling points.
Last year it was the first fork to roll out a built-in VPN that could be used free of charge. However, with millions of users the associated VPN provider Kebrum had trouble keeping up with the massive demand.
“Our user base grew so quickly and is still growing at a tremendous pace that we’re having difficulties keeping up with the volume. Only a small percentage of the huge number of our users we have can use the VPN simultaneously at the moment,” the Popcorn Time team tells TF.
This motivated the developers to look for various alternatives to keep its users secure. In this quest the Invisible Internet Project (I2P) caught their eye.
“We’re now making the first steps in examining integration of Popcorn Time with the I2P network,” the team explains.
Category: Copyright
Pirate Site’s Deal With Police Backfires Massively
In the wake of The Pirate Bay raid in December, Swedish police intensified their focus on one of the country’s top streaming portals, Dreamfilm.se. The site had been growing in popularity for some time but it appears that in recent weeks police had been homing in.
Early January everything seemed fairly normal when the site ran a promotion offering 100 movie tickets to fans who shared the picture below on Facebook. Plenty of people participated.
On January 14 the site published the Facebook links of 100 winners and requested that they send in their names and addresses to claim their prizes. But just a few weeks later and it’s now all over for Dreamfilm.“After an administrator was detained and interrogated, it has been mutually agreed that dreamfilm.se will be shut down for good,” the site reveals in a statement.
“The police gave us an ultimatum, to shut down the site and be free, or to keep it online and be detained again.”
It seems that after an extended period trying to close the site, the authorities finally had the upper hand.
“Following controversial interrogation methods it was decided that the site and everything to do with it will be shut down for good. With this, all other administrators decided to resign altogether from the site’s operations with immediate effect,” the site’s operators add.
Thanking users for their dedication over the years, the admins bid farewell to the site and its members. Well, sort of…..
It appears that while some of the site’s admins agreed to close down the site, others did not give the police the same undertakings. They have now broken ranks and created a brand new venture. Today, DreamFilm.se is dead but DreamFilmHD.com lives on in its predecessor’s form.
Studios Fed Up With Funding The MPAA: Changes May Be Coming
In a behind-the-scenes drama, the Sony Pictures chairman Michael Lynton last month told industry colleagues of a plan to withdraw from the movie trade organization, according to people who have been briefed on the discussions. He cited the organization’s slow response and lack of public support in the aftermath of the attack on Sony and its film “The Interview,” as well as longstanding concerns about the cost and efficacy of the group.
Yes, Major Record Labels Are Keeping Nearly All The Money They Get From Spotify, Rather Than Giving It To Artists
A small group of very vocal musicians has decided that the new target of their anger, after attacking cyberlockers, search engines and torrent sites, should be legal, authorized streaming services. They’ve decided that the payouts from these services are simply too low, even though almost none of these services are anywhere close to profitable, and most are handing out the vast majority of their revenue to copyright holders. The complaints are often nonsensical. Way back in 2012, we noted that the target of these musicians’ anger appeared to be misplaced, as the CEO of Merlin (which represents a ton of indie labels) admitted that the real problem was that Spotify paid lots of money to labels and it was the labels not giving that money to the artists. Yet, rather than blaming their own labels (or their own contracts), these artists lashed out at Spotify and other streaming services. Just a few months ago, we covered this issue again, with even Bono admitting that the real problem was the lack of transparency from the labels.
And, it appears, there’s a decent reason why those labels haven’t been eager to be transparent: because they’re keeping most of the money. The Music Business Worldwide site has the details on a new report put together by Ernst & Young with the French record label trade group SNEP, concerning where the money from streaming services Deezer and Spotify ends up. Spoiler alert: it’s not with the artists.
Negotiators Burn Their Last Opportunity to Salvage the TPP by Caving on Copyright Term Extension
New reports indicate that Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators have agreed to language that would bind its 12 signatory nations to extend copyright terms to match the United States’ already excessive length of copyright. This provision expands the reach of the controversial US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (or the “Mickey Mouse Act” as it was called due to Disney’s heavy lobbying) to countries of the Pacific region. Nations including Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Canada would all be required to extend their terms and grant Big Content companies lengthy exclusive rights to works for no empirical reason. This means that all of the TPP’s extreme enforcement provisions would apply to creative works for upwards of 100 years.
Negotiators have been made well aware that there is no economic rationale that can justify this extension. The fact that they have chosen to ignore what is a clear consensus among economists points to the fact that this agreement has not been driven by reason, but by the utter corruption of the process by lobbyists for multinational entertainment conglomerates, who have twisted what is notionally a trade negotiation into a special interest money-grab. After all of the trouble that public interest advocates have gone to educate negotiators about the folly of term extension, the fact that they have gone ahead anyway is the last straw for us. We’ll now be pulling out all the stops to kill this agreement dead.
Android Dev ‘Punishes’ Pirates at the Behest of Reddit
This is actually one of the better approaches I’ve seen in quite a while. Kudos to the developer.
Software, which has traditionally been expensive to buy, has always been targeted by those with small budgets seeking to enjoy products often placed out of reach. But price doesn’t always provide an excuse for those obtaining software without permission. With the rise of smart phones and tablet computers, software has become cheaper than ever, with many paid apps now available for just a few dollars.
One such app is Today Calendar Pro from UK developer Jack Underwood. It’s an already popular replacement calendar for Android with 4.5 stars from several thousand voters on Google Play. However, like many devs, Underwood is trying to find a way to bring down piracy rates. Just a few hours ago he revealed to Reddit users that 85% of people are using pirate versions of his app.
How to reduce that volume quickly became the topic of conversation. Some Reddit users were very aggressive but Underwood eventually settled on a more gentle approach.
“Today Calendar Pro has a 85% piracy rate, so the way we’ve chosen to combat that is to have the app randomly insert pirate-themed events if the app decides the install is pirated,” Underwood told TorrentFreak.
David v. Goliath: pro se defendant prevails over copyright shakedown cartel
It all boils down to evidence. If there is no evidence whatsoever, an attentive and diligent judge won’t allow a case assigned to him to linger – he will rule summarily in defendant’s favor. That’s exactly what happened today. An experienced cardsharper Malibu Media (M. Keith Lipscomb) didn’t convince the judge that the proof of infringement (or, more precisely, the lack thereof) elevates to a necessary level of controversy that requires a jury trial.
The most hilarious part is that the defendant wasn’t even represented — he fought pro se instead. This tells volumes about the quality of Malibu’s “investigation” and “proof.” What we witness is a bluff on a massive scale, nothing more.
Hollywood’s Release Delays Breed Pirates
Hollywood has a message to all those pirates who keep making excuses to download and stream films illegally.
“You have no excuse.”
The major movie studios have done enough to make their content legally available, launching thousands of convenient movie services worldwide, they claim.
“We need to bust the myth that legal content is unavailable. Creative industries are tirelessly experimenting with new business models that deliver films, books, music, TV programs, newspapers, games and other creative works to consumers,” Stan McCoy noted on the MPAA blog this week.
“In Europe, there are over 3,000 on-demand audio-visual services available to European citizens,” he adds.
So is the MPA right? Is “availability” an imaginary problem that pirates use as an excuse not to pay?
DRM Destroys Value: Why Years Old, But DRM Free, Devices Sell For Twice The Price Of New Devices
Back in 2010, I paid $99 for an Apple TV–technically, the Apple TV (2nd generation). Recently, it stopped receiving software updates, so I decided to put it on eBay. I was surprised that I was able to sell a piece of four-year old electronics for $161–it’s not often you make a profit on old devices.
The reason for this is simple–tinkerers have figured out how to jailbreak the 2nd generation Apple TV, but not the 3rd gen one, which is the one Apple currently sells (also for $99).
Illegal File-Sharing In Norway is Virtually Eliminated
Shock and horror, it looks like actually offering a good product makes people want to pay?
A countrywide survey in December 2014 showed that just 4% of Norwegians under 30 years still used illegal file-sharing platforms to get hold of music.
Even better for the worldwide industry, less than 1% of people under 30 years said that file-sharing was their main source of obtaining music.
“We are now offering services that are both better and more user-friendly than illegal platforms… In [the past] five years, we have virtually eliminated illegal file-sharing in the music industry.”