@rrhoover@andrewwarner I live in a country where copyright law is almost nonexistant, and simply I don't care. I will keep moving the website, changing domains and providers... I don't need to earn a single penny from it, I just want to do it because I believe that piracy will eventually cause the streaming bubble to pop, and the movie studios will realize that:
a) Geo-blocking is pointless - It just makes it more expensive to legally watch content (see VPNs+Netflix)
b) Charging for a movie the same amount of money in the U.S. with the minimum wage of $7 and Serbia, with a minimum wage of less than $1. It's insane and causes people to pirate
c) Legitimate streaming websites must not have any DRM and not include any proprietary codecs, as that causes the browser to be vulnerable due to the sloppy programming.
d) Legitimate streaming websites must be available all over the world in all languages, with movies that people want to watch in that region.
I Don't care about how that's "impossible". If they don't realize that, they're going to be "battling" piracy forever, and piracy always wins. You cut off one head, 5 more grow out.
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@milankragujevic@andrewwarner keep bending yourself in knots over the justification. The reality is that no one that this effects monetarily "works" for the MPAA. They are a lobbying organization. The worldwide rights picture as applied to movies (and music) is much, much, much more complicated than strictly "greed". But of course simplistic justifications for piracy (and reactionary measures to combat it) are old enough to drive by now, so fuck it.
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@milankragujevic@andrewwarner The website seems to be down already, have you got another site up? Or perhaps a twitter handle I can follow to follow the domains?
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@ethank funny to see you here :) long time no see ++
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I'm confused on the legality of this...is it legal because the server has the torrent and not the viewer? Sorry if this is obvious.
@samchristie No one said it was legal. The law discriminates on the basis of what you are downloading. If you are downloading non-copyrighted material, then use of these sites is entirely legal. In the case of copyrighted data, downloading is illegal.
If you illegally downloaded copyrighted material, there is almost certainly nothing to worry about. Tens of millions of people are downloading items from torrent sites every day with no repercussions, but only a few tens of thousands have been prosecuted over the last decade. The odds are in your favor.
However, there are legal hazards. Some rare files are bait intentionally placed there by companies who hope to catch you in the act. They monitor the IP addresses of anyone who downloads said bait and then notify the ISPs of the downloaders. ISPs take no legal action here, but they will send you a (usually) polite warning.
The real sharks are organizations like the MPAA or the RIAA. Luckily, it is not legally easy for these people to get ISPs to disclose your downloading habits. The MPAA and RIAA have to jump through a variety of legal hoops to get your identity. For efficiency, they prefer to do this to a few thousand people at a time, most of those will be offered settlements in the range of thousands of dollars.
Thankfully, there are methods that you can research for obscuring your IP address. Since ISPs need the illegality of the download to be brought to their attention in the first place, using software that hides your IP (like a VPN) from the organizations watching downloaders will make piracy much safer for you.
Source: Quora
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@irvingtorresyc I've just never seen an illegal product on PH so I was just confused
@samchristie I've seen products on PH that clearly violate the TOS of the APIs they rely on. For a memory-jogger, please consider the (several) "web to Instagram uploaders" we've seen.
@esbvn The server downloads the torrent and then uploads it to you, the visitor. Currently, it's impossible to download torrents to the browser. WebTorrent.io tried, but it only works with other web peers, not with traditional seedboxes and torrent clients.
@milankragujevic webtorrent.io is still in progress and I think you've misunderstood where the project is headed; it's a process that will take time to get other torrent clients (uTorrent, Vuze, etc) to adopt the new BEP protocol in order to interop with web peers, and this WILL happen. It is a fundamentally and significantly better approach than serving static downloads of torrents because hosting such a site would *not* be nearly as illegal and the distribution costs, scalability, and efficient high resolution streaming are all handled out of the box, all of which are next to impossible with the current approach unless you have Netflix-size resources at your disposal...
I think popcorn time in your browser is a great and natural progression for the popcorn time movement and I'm totally in agreement that technology needs to drive change in the media space, but I think any serious entry here should have the expectation of being powered by webtorrent down the road.
(disclaimer: I'm one of the core contributors to the webtorrent project)
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I'm not comfortable using this product and I'm a bit disappointed PH allows these types of products.
Many people here are app developers who charge money for their work. I wonder how you'd feel if someone cracked your app and made it easily available for free to the world? All your hard work, which is fair that you'd be compensated for, distributed for free. How can you use, or condone, this type of theivery? I know many will say "if you don't like it then don't use it", and that's fair; I won't. But think about the people you're stealing from. Not the big stars, directors, and producers, but the thousands of others who feed their families on the money residuals/fees charged to legitimate viewers.
If you use this product, and others here that are blatantly illegal, you have no right to charge anyone any money for your work. It's that simple.
@fbara I always love the moral justification that arises around piracy. There's always lots of fascinating things said, often interesting insites into how ecosystems work and valid complaints about how existing business models work... but never a clear response to why it's ok to take something from creators without compensating them in the way they've asked to be compensated.
@fbara I've been paying spotify for years. Give me a similar service for movies and I'll pay up faster than you can say Popcorn,
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@fbara If we stay on this topic - movies/tvshows- then no, the only one's benefiting from this are directors, actors, etc = movie industry. Once that industry stops treating their customers as if the're sheeps that's when people will stop pirate stuff. Start a tv show in US, then ONLY after it's available on dvd ship it to other countries; Oh and don't make those dvd's available in those countries because first you'll need to cash in on tv rights, so people are forced to watch something that's a year old. And after all that start season two and repeat the whole process. It's OK to make money, but stop thinking that people are stupid; There's a reason Spotify has more than 20 million paying customers.
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@fbara I'm really disappointed as well. And to see so many up votes! I believe many people here are trying to make money at their own businesses and would be horrified if people were stealing from them... but yet they advocate stealing copyrighted materials and not paying for content. Very abhorrent behavior from this crowd in my opinion!
@mattbrian Coming soon, probably in an hour or so.
Edit: Unfortunately, there is an issue with videojs player and I can't add subtitles. The back end is in place, as soon as I solve that issue subtitles will be turned on.
@mattbrian After many hours of work (actually 2 hours), subtitles have been added! Test it out. I'm aware of UTF-8 encoding issues and garbled characters, but AFAIK desktop Popcorn Time suffers from that, too. That's just how encodings work. I'm sorry.
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