Is Popcorn Time Legal?
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Hello dear friends,
Excuse me if this is not a good place to ask my question, but I thought I could answer my question here.
I need a website to watch movies, there are many options available like Netflix and Hulu, but these sites uses DRM technology!
I find ((popcorn time)) website and it's great, but my friends told me that using this site is illegal, because it violates copyright law!
Popcorn time is a free software (with GPL v3 license) and source code available in here: https://github.com/popcorn-official
please guide me... I have no idea. Is popcorn time legal or illegal? should I use it or not?!
Thanks a lot...
The answer might depend on the legislation you live under. But it is almost certainly "Popcorn Time is illegal". Now, you decide whether you should respect a law that prevents you from sharing your culture.
Popcorn Time is not a website, it is a heavy client mainly bundling a BitTorrent client and a video player.
In my humble opinion, the thread should have been started in https://trisquel.info/forum/general-free-software-talk
> But it is
> almost certainly "Popcorn Time is illegal".
Is the software itself likely to be illegal? It can certainly be used to
illegally acquire and play copyrighted works, but so can other
BitTorrent clients and video players. I'm sure there are companies who
would like to ban BitTorrent clients and any video players that don't
impose DRM, but we're not there yet, are we?
Well, I am not a lawyer. Here is what Wikipedia reports on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time#Legality
I am a translator!
>Popcorn Time is not a website, it is a heavy client mainly bundling a BitTorrent client and a video player.
It is the bloated version of peerflix, nothing more than a super heavy GUI added to it. And it needs no GUI at all, it could not be more straightforward. Highly recommended software btw -> https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix
o/
* consider whether obeying an amoral law makes you moral or amoral.
Popcorn Time is more than a BitTorrent client. It presents thumbnails of movies/series/animes/indies (in independent tabs), classified by genre, by season (for series), ordered by popularity/year/IMDB ratings/etc., along with the synopsis, the available resolutions, the available subtitles (it can be configured to always play with subtitles, if available for your language), it keeps track of what the user watched, of her "favorites", etc.
I am a member!
Buying a DVD and playing it on your own Trisquel laptop is illegal.
?
Like most things, the real answer is "it depends."
Popcorn Time itself is a BitTorrent client. BitTorrent in and of itself cannot be illegal any more than a photocopier could be. It's what people *do* with it that determines whether their *actions* are. There are entirely legal torrents. One example is http://www.publicdomaintorrents.info/ If someone were to use something like Popcorn Time to obtain a video from there I would be hard-pressed to say which law(s) were broken. That people might also use it to transfer copies of other things without authorization should not change this but sadly some seem to blur the distinction between the tool and the actions.
Popcorn Time has the added matter, though, of steering people to specific torrents to select from to download and watch which might raise the issue of contributory copyright infringement that a stand-alone program like Transmission probably doesn't. But, people could always use Popcorn Time to get their own (legal) things and avoid that. But if you're using Popcorn Time to get copyrighted material without permission, there is no getting around that there's copyright infringement going on. So, it all depends.
But the illegal thing would be the sharing of copyrighted material without permission, not the software, regardless of how people might want to blur the lines.
My disclaimer here is that I'm in the U.S. and so my analyses will always have a U.S.-centric viewpoint to them. The answer for other areas may very well be different but that still contributes back to what I said that the beginning: It depends.
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