11–20 of 104 posts
I have a different theory. I think everyone who touches it gets a payout. Think about it--legal threats tend to make people angry. Especially anti-intellectual property types. By the odds, shouldn't we be seeing a Streisand effect? Being set for life, though, now that's a good motivator to keep your mouth shut.
Everyone is shown the carrot and the stick.
It would be great if a developer beyond the reach of the Western legal system would take this project up with a self hosted repo. Code is speech. It's a terrible precedent for devs to be afraid to have code (including me after reading this). This is where the myriad of outdated laws and prosecutorial discretion bites: it's impossible to know where the legal line is. __ Addition: My view on the savvy modus operandi he…
Replace Popcorn Time with any kind of politically undesirable activity, and it sounds exactly like so many stories from so many totalitarian regimes.
It would be great if a developer beyond the reach of the Western legal system would take this project up with a self hosted repo. Code is speech. It's a terrible precedent for devs to be afraid to have code (including me after reading this). This is where the myriad of outdated laws and prosecutorial discretion bites: it's impossible to know where the legal line is. __ Addition: My view on the savvy modus operandi he…
As for what actually happened to PT, it isn't as clear-cut as it seems.
I can tell you one thing as food for thought, though. I contributed a minor patch to two forks. I was granted a small amount of dogecoins (about $.10) for one of those contributions. The notion that there would be a remuneration model behind that rather unique type of open-source project tells a lot about how lacking we are. We miss economic models for the free capabilities we build. Things like Gittip only just emerge, but the way they solve the problem of having multiple people be granted a fair share of buying power based on their contributions don't actually rely on a robust mathematical model, and are very probably flawed at scale. That is true of Gittip, it is true of Flattr (notably irrelevant when dealing with a team), it is even true of the Bitcoin ecosystem, given the absence of a proof for the convergence of its volatility.
Those challenges raised by the amazing prospect of a truly decentralized economy are greater than building an app on top of a peer-to-peer network of video distribution. They wouldn't be the first to direct their efforts there, either; a famous TPB member created Flattr after putting his TPB past behind.
PS: on the issue of the struggle for equitable remuneration, here is an outstanding blog post by someone working in a cooperative called Igalia; he did contractor work on V8 and Firefox for Bloomberg: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/25/time-for-money
Edit: Isn't this it? https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app
What exactly is the problem?
Anyone have the code somewhere? I'll host it. Edit: Isn't this it? https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app What exactly is the problem?
It would be great if a developer beyond the reach of the Western legal system would take this project up with a self hosted repo. Code is speech. It's a terrible precedent for devs to be afraid to have code (including me after reading this). This is where the myriad of outdated laws and prosecutorial discretion bites: it's impossible to know where the legal line is. __ Addition: My view on the savvy modus operandi he…
I'm honestly surprised that nobody (that I know off) has started to develop a fork while being behind Tor/I2P.
Popcorn Time is _this_ close to being the Napster of Film, Hollywood must be literally shitting bricks. Someone has probably taken it upon himself to threaten these devs in a nasty (and perhaps illegal) way. Surely the story will come out eventually. In the meantime, Popcorn Time is fully available to download. So I'm not sure what genie they're putting back in the bottle....
The threat could be nothing more than suing for copyright violation. The fines for that are insanely high, and evidence of such is not necessarily hard to collect. After all, it's highly unlikely the devs were developing Popcorn Time without using it themselves.
Either way, whoever will be working next on it, it would be preferable if he was from Spain:
http://torrentfreak.com/records-labels-lose-big-as-court-dec...