Is this legal in Canada? Because this constitutes streaming and not uploading, so it should be legal?
The Canadian copyright lawyer I talked to says no:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/popcorn-time-is-like-netfl...
Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
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Re: Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
#42Is this legal in Canada? Because this constitutes streaming and not uploading, so it should be legal?
This is not streaming, this is just torrenting and it includes uploading. The only difference between this and other torrent clients is that it downloads torrent files sequentially by default and opens the file as soon as you have enough data to start watching. From the FAQ: Popcorn Time works using torrents, fair enough. Am I seeding while watching a movie? Indeed, you are. You're going to be uploading bits and bits…
This is what (sadly) puts a hole in the concept. Because most of the tyrant ISPs don't provide symmetric connections, you are never going to maintain a 1.0 ratio throughout a viewing, so you depend on seed boxes to keep the download demands from crippling popular videos. Unless they add a daemon option to keep seeding when not using the app, users are always leechers.
Re: Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
#43Re: Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
#44> Downloading copyrighted material may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk.
Have we seriously just stopped considering the ethical implications of such things? At least these sorts of sites used to pretend they were for things like "public domain movies" and "personal backups."
Re: Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
#45If you look at this file here: https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app/blob/master/js/t...
It sends usage data to Google Analytics. I can see how this can translate into you getting caught. Be careful.
Even if you don't have a 'trackingId' set it still sends GET requests to http://google.com/
Re: Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
#46Re: Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
#47This seems waaaaaayyy too polished in all respects for an app designed to break the law. I would not be at all surprised if those prebuilt binaries were sending your details off to the MPAA.
The MPAA already has the ability to view torrent seeds, why would they waste so much resources to create this?
Re: Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
#48fucking awesome
Re: Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
#49uTorrent has a similar function [1], but from what I've heard, it's spotty at best. It's rare that you'll get enough of the packets at the right places to get a coherent stream going. Especially if you haven't told it to stream from the start of the torrent. Gonna be interesting to see how this goes, same concept or some cool tech in the background like S3? [1] http://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/ut3#faq1
I've always thought of how revolutionary it would be to have some kind of video hosting site where you distributed encrypted content throughout the users in fragments. When you would be using the client it would always be broadcasting to others, but you could enable or disable a background daemon to do it throughout the day. You could have it "smart allocate" the video cache, and it would keep local your favorites an…
Why couldn't you maintain a local cache with JavaScript? Chrome and Opera already support the Filesystem API and it's only a matter of time before it ceases to be a working draft. But even discounting that API (which allows you to set a user authorized storage limit your application has read/write access to) there are already ways to cache > 5 MB of data in the browser; they're just hacks at this point.