Although suffering setbacks and developer woes (both legal and personal) movie and media pirate streamer software Popcorn Time appears to be on the path to resurrection. According to an article in Tech Times that cites a currently updating Reddit thread about the full relaunch of the product.

The easy-to-use peer-to-peer pirate streaming software has proven a very difficult piece of software to kill over the past two years. As an open source project, the viewer has been forked repeatedly since its emergence in 2014—some forks are better than others—with more popular fork developers swiftly finding themselves in hot water from copyright holders.

Most recently the main trunk and most popular version of Popcorn Time, PopcornTime.io had its development team split over making money off VPN services. (Virtual private networks are used by many for privacy and can hide copyright infringing use from ISPs.) In early November, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) crowed that it had found and sued several PopcornTime.io developers in Canada. That lawsuit also took down the main website for the project. Then, in late November, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN (Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherland) located and sued two other Popcorn Time developers and enjoined them from working on the project under threat of a €2,000 fine per day (around $2,120 per day) for violating the settlement agreement.

Community-led projects worse than zombies for anti-piracy groups

Popcorn Time has proved to be surprisingly pernicious and difficult for anti-piracy groups to stop and in less than two years it has become almost as painful a thorn in the side of copyright holders as The Pirate Bay. Anti-piracy groups have fought hard to shut down TPB and the site is only a tracker for torrents (indexes of files, in this case movies or other media, being shared on the BitTorrent network) and does not infringe on copyright directly as Popcorn Time facilitates.

Yet over the years anti-piracy groups have expended great amounts of money and manpower on taking down The Pirate Bay, now much of that baleful attention has been turned to Popcorn Time.

photo credit: sarah sosiak via photopin cc

However, just like BitTorrent peer-to-peer networks and the Internet itself, Popcorn Time is an open source project, which means that taking out one community-led development does not stem the tide of interest. Worse for anti-piracy groups, computer geek culture has long been a space safe for problem solvers seeking to overcome barriers to the distribution of media. The Internet, the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol, media viewers, etc. all have copyright legal uses, and Popcorn Time simply puts them into a simple, easy-to-use package that allow press-button delivery of media (arguably indeed at that point infringing on copyright.)

Popcorn Time has seen multiple forks such as PopcornTime.io, Browser Popcorn and now Popcorn Time CE. The latter is the community favorite fork and the one mentioned in the Reddit thread mentioned above, it is currently under development and as an open-source project can even be compiled by enterprising users.

There are currently downloads from PopcornTime.ml of Popcorn Time CE for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The source code is available in a Git repository as well and is fully open.

Although still being hunted by anti-piracy groups, Popcorn Time CE is seeking developers to join their cause. No doubt the continual heavy-handed tactics and constantly bad public relations received by groups such as the MPAA and BREIN will encourage developers to join up and widen that thorn in their side.

Featured image credit: https://browserpopcorn.xyz/ screenshot