How feasible would it be to build an alt coin on top of Popcorn-Time. Call it PopCoin or Popcorn-Coin or something :). You pay every time you watch a movie, you get paid for hosting torrents and some percentage of each transaction is routed to the content creator/whoever owns the rights to the content?
Popcorn Time is back
121–130 of 141 posts
Re: Popcorn Time is back
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you not remember programs like Napster and Limewire? They were as convenient as iTunes (years before iTMS was launched) and offered every song you could imagine. It's just surprising that it's taken so long for similar services to mature for video content.
> and offered every song you could imagine This is where I tend to disagree. Yes, popular songs were on there, but terribly tagged (or outright mislabeled), and half of it was porn. Not even varied porn, just the same damn videos replicated a million times.
I don't remember video at all in Napster and most Napster rooms were very nice. People actually catalogued their library in use and we could download from a specific user.
I suppose you are talking about emule or Kazaa, but Napster was surely a very nice place to hang out. I have met even met people there, people I still talk to this day.
Re: Popcorn Time is back
#123Next they could add chromecast support / transcoding and they have a pretty good competitor for plex. After that a couple of mobile clients?
You can stream it to Chromecast with this trick: http://www.textndata.com/blog/chromecast-popcorn-time-movies
Re: Popcorn Time is back
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If everyone used it ... no new content would show up This is to me a bit disturbing. When we say this, we are announcing to the world that culture has inherently no value what so ever. The only way to create value from culture is to prohibit poor people from participating, thus creating an artificial divide that benefits those who have over those who haven't. Governments are the one who enforces this divide with co…
Copyright is free, and it protects poor people's work from being appropriated by rich people.
>it protects poor people's work from being appropriated by rich people
No it doesn't. Major corporations like Target and H&M rip off small designers all the time. Litigation is expensive, and unfairly favors wealthier parties.
Re: Popcorn Time is back
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now, for morality to be on their side, they need to publicly advocate and work on a better way to remunerate the content creators. Of course, they could go rogue and act exclusively out of spite for big media, arguing parasitically that how the content creators make money is none of their business. But I really hope they don't.
> work on a better way to remunerate the content creators. No one gets rewarded for this. The content creators have the exclusive right to establish their pricing terms. Other entities can make offers, of course, but copyright law gives them the exclusive right to establish pricing and distribution. And they don't want to talk about it. They don't think they have a problem.
Let's say I live in an Eastern European kleptocracy. Let's say it's fairly impossible to purchase things legally. What about showing them that I'm actually worth it. If people set up a way to actually donate to the content creators anonymously, we could prove that we aren't actually kleptomaniacs and show what a donation system would actually reap for them. They won't sell it to me legally after all.
Re: Popcorn Time is back
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a difference. When movies are copied, nobody takes the credits out and adds their name into them. We're talking about attribution vs. copyright. They're completely separate issues, and it trips people up every time something like this gets posted.
In both cases we are talking about taking what you want distributing it to others because you can irrespective of the views of the content creator(s) and other interested parties. In both cases someone is saying "how dare you do what I don't want you to do?" because they believe they have the right to control such activities and the other party either disagrees with that belief or simply doesn't care.
Yeah, and if we zoom out far enough, every crime is really about people being selfish, so really, it's all the same. The point was that he's not complaining about copyright infringement, he's complaining about attribution. Moral conclusions aside, a lot of people do confuse these two concepts, and they are in fact different concepts, and it's worth distinguishing them. That's all I was saying.
Re: Popcorn Time is back
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
This solution is what the content creators want too: the problem is how to pay for it. Micropayments are the obvious choice, but they're currently impractical for a number of reasons (Bitcoin is promising but has yet to clear adoption hurdles necessary to hit the mainstream). I don't know that this will ever come to pass though. Micropayment tech is just too far off, and workable online distribution models are alread…
A distributed network is not well suited to micropayments. With every user it exponentially increases the resources used. Bitcoin can handle about 7 transactions a second maximum. Much less currently.
Yeah; there are technical limitations with Bitcoin that are well-known. I was referring more to virtual currencies in general; Bitcoin is unlikely to be the final evolution of virtual currency. My comment was more about how Bitcoin raises the promise, but I do know it's unlikely to be able to fulfill it.
Re: Popcorn Time is back
#128Some of the reactions here remind me of the time when mp3 starting to gain traction (circa ~1995). A lot of people were worried this new file format would mark the end of entertainment business: who would spend money to buy songs when they could download for free in mp3 format? I guess I don't need to point out how much money Apple has made through iTunes by selling unprotected audio tracks for the past years. In oth…
My brother works in Hollywood, and would make the distinction that while musicians can make money on tour and with merch, movies basically only make money from selling the right to watch the thing. I'd like to justify pirating movies, but I actually find that logic compelling. Ideas on other ways for folks in movies to get paid?
There's a ton of ways Hollywood can get paid but it may not be as easy or profitable.
Although it wouldn't be popular I could imagine Hollywood relying more on product placement. I've noticed TV shows targeted at young people having increasing amounts of brands in them.
Plus there's Kickstarter style. People pay for the movie they want to get made. Veronica Mars was funded this way.
Re: Popcorn Time is back
#129This is just another indication that video media is in need of a new medium. There is a need something like Steam or Spotify, but for TV Shows and movies. Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, etc. are all lacking in terms of the videos they offer and there's nothing to fill the void unless you want to go into the realm of physical media (and let's be honest, you don't). Torrents are easy, but managing a collection and getting good quality videos is still a pain.
I'm in college now and I started torrenting music in the 8th grade - iTunes came and I realized that I would have had to spend thousands of dollars to get the collection I wanted - so I continued to torrent music. I would have missed out on a lot of music if I relied on iTunes (and be out $100k or so) but once I found Spotify and realized that I would no longer have to edit all the ID3 tags, find album work, and deal with poor audio quality for $5 a month, I instantly switched and haven't looked back (except for music they lack like The Beatles, AC/DC, and Def Leppard which I still torrent, oops).
Game of Thrones recently broke a torrent record [1] and the CEO of HBO basically said they appreciate the publicity and thank their fans. IMO money is not as big of an issue for video as it is for music because the networks and actors aren't suffering the way musicians do (this is just my opinion based on observation). Yeah, Spotify has been called out for not compensating artists properly [2] but I think it's a step in the right direction in terms of service.
I like the idea of something like Popcorn Time but I think it's just a wake-up call that there is a need for innovation in the realm of video media. The music and gaming industries have seen a shift in recent years, so maybe movies and tv shows are not far behind...
[1] http://time.com/63331/game-of-thrones-torrent-record/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/thom-yorke-explains-why-he-ha...
Re: Popcorn Time is back
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GPL does require attribution. It was the advertising clause of the older BSD licenses (similar to the one used by OpenSSL) that was problematic for the GPL, because it imposed restrictions on activities not directly connected to the software. You absolutely cannot remove copyright notices from GPL software and claim credit for it.
> You absolutely cannot remove copyright notices from GPL software and claim credit for it. There is nothing in the GPL that requires preserving upstream copyright notices in downstream modified versions of software, or any other form of attribution of the origin of modified versions; it does require "appropriate copyright notice", but since copyright on a derived work rests with the creator of the derivative, the mo…
provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty
Removing notices can be very dangerous, and should not be done without legal advice. The default way to include GPL is to also have an absence of warranty, which is explicitly required to keep intact in modified version.