DMCA Takedown Notice for Popcorn Time and Time4Popcorn

and they they share sources -> http://popcorn-time.se/source.html

I think my general point is this:

In a world where energy, food, and real estate are inflating and wages are flat or deflating, it behooves us to be incredibly skeptical of any agenda or meme that devalues or takes leverage away from labor. Ask yourself "cui bono?"

"Information wants to be free" is another way of saying "I don't want to pay people for knowledge work or art." Now who wouldn't want to do that? Maybe... oh... I don't know... multi-billion-dollar companies that make money by shoveling "content" out to consumers in exchange for being able to track their every move and sell it to advertisers? If they have to pay for content, that's just a cost to them. So it behooves those industries to promote the meme that piracy is great and information should be free, since it helps to devalue the "content" that they need to keep their surveillance based marketing machines running.

I'm starting to see the purveyors of aggressive industrial-scale piracy as being analogous to the brown shirt types that used to go out and bust kneecaps of union members to intimidate them into accepting concessions. Dropping the bottom out of higher-priced content models makes producers of content more willing to accept pennies on the dollar later.

I've been skeptical of free for a while, but believe it or not the Snowden revelations really pushed me over the edge. It made it very clear that free == surveillance is the business model, and it therefore got me really thinking skeptically about the concept of free (as in beer).

I don't think it's always bad. I work on open source software. But I think it must be the creator's choice.

I'm also not a fan of the DMCA as written -- it contains some nasty and odious terms that are ripe for abuse like the "anti-circumvention" clause -- but in this case I think it's being used in the right way to shut down something that's deliberately abusive.

DMCA 1201 has nothing to do with Popcorn Time. That covers DRM circumvention (and should be repealed). The theory of liability for Popcorn Time is under the Grokster ruling, if the authors are inducing copyright infringement by promoting the tool for that purpose.

The notice and takedown provision is DMCA 512, which is a safe harbor for hosts like Github. It says (roughly) that you aren't liable for copyright infringement of your users if you timely respond to take down notices. But Github wouldn't be liable for copyright infringement anyway because the Popcorn Time software is not copyrighted by the claimants and Github isn't the party allegedly inducing copyright infringement. So Github apparently doesn't have to comply with the notice if they don't want to.

Of course, almost everyone complies with all notices whatsoever regardless of how absurd or invalid they are, because the host doesn't have a strong enough incentive to fight somebody else's battle. That's the free speech issue.

At some level both these apps are big time enablers of copyright infringement. Maybe you don't think that's a bad thing and all copyright laws should be gutted, or maybe you want to play lawyer or (worse) make analogies. That is totally not the point here.

The point is, what some view as copyright infringement, others view as unsatisfied demand. Music has already crossed the chasm, but that's probably more because there is so much more of it in such smaller economic units. Big budget movies have more mass and will find it harder to leap that chasm to streaming services.

I think that if anyone manages it, it will be Apple. And it will start with TV, not movies.

I will take issue with cheald's "marginal manufacturing cost" argument, a big budget movie has to make back its gigantic capital investment, and each unit of consumption has to pay its share.