Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 272 posts

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#111

Post by anigbrowl »

parallelist wrote: post #42
lvs wrote: post #12

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but…

The Internet broke the whole idea of charging for a digital copy of something. We’re seeing a struggle of powers as old power tries to cling on to the idea of charging people for digital copies but it will end sooner or later. One needs to think outside the box of capitalism being an appropriate system for all aspects of society.

Well do get in touch when someone sets up a postcapitalist film company that's willing to pay for camera rental, meals, wages and all the other expenses that go into making a film, because the fixed costs of making the original work haven't gone away. I find discussions like this one really aggravating to read because there seems to be total indifference to the fact that producing a movie to entertain you for two hours while you sit on the couch or wherever involves a massive amount of time, hard work, and risk from a large number of people.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#112

Post by wodenokoto »

abandonliberty wrote: post #86
zaroth wrote: post #60

If I were going to download copyrighted material, I certainly wouldn't do it over BitTorrent. When the software architecture ensures the only target is the end user, surely end users will end up targeted. When that happens, that single download which would have fallen below the $1,000 threshold is now actually criminal distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution. Your VPN provider's IP address i…

Could you elaborate how this is more secure?

Its not more secure, you are just less liable. If you DL via torrents you automatically share the content as well. So you are not just DL illegal content, but also distributing it.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#113

Post by sroerick »

ogig wrote: post #7
sroerick wrote: post #3

Does anybody know what it would require to fork Popcorn Time to only support Creative Commons and public domain content? I've spent a lot of time boycotting copyrighted works and I'd like to have a nice user interface to do this.

Popcorn is two things: A bittorrent streamer, and a frontend for an api serving film/torrent info. At the moment it uses yify as the backend. For your project you would need to have the media published as torrents and a backend api that points to the media you want instead of the current one. You can drop a torrent file into Popcorn and it will start streaming, if that makes things clearer.

Interesting. Is yify or any equivalent open sourced? could I fork that project?

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#114

Post by sroerick »

bbcbasic wrote: post #73
sroerick wrote: post #3

Does anybody know what it would require to fork Popcorn Time to only support Creative Commons and public domain content? I've spent a lot of time boycotting copyrighted works and I'd like to have a nice user interface to do this.

Being pedantic: CC works still have copyright. Depending on your country I think it may be impossible as a creator of something to give up your copyright. Based on what I have read here on HN before. But CC comes with permissive licensing, which I guess is what you are filtering-in with your boycott.

This is a good point. I guess my issue is creators (or more often, studios and labels) who are using copyright to restrict modern tech.

Isn't a CC-0 license the equivalent to a public domain dedication, though?

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#115

Post by tmpacc94853 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #78
lvs wrote: post #12

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but…

I call bullshit. Absolute bullshit. If I gave you a credit card that gave you unlimited access to digital content you probably wouldn't be complaining. Certainly not if you live in the US or much of Europe. If you have a $69 AppleTV then iTunes is a spectacular user experience. Search for almost anything you want and hit play. If it didn't cost $5 to rent a movie it's superior to torrents. This is where someone chime…

American Pirate Here. I pirate things for many reasons I suppose. When it comes to video games I actually prefer to buy games on steam rather than pirate them. But if the game is not available on steam (like some of EA's big games that they only release on origin for pc) then I will instead pirate them. If origin had the quality that steam did then I wouldn't mind installing it, but that is not the case. I also pirate game of thrones, which for a long time could only be viewed legally with an HBO subscription. I think it is silly to have to subscribe to something and pay a yearly fee just to watch 10 episodes of a single show once a year. If HBO wasn't so greedy then I would have gladly paid them; but as a service that I feel is overpriced and offers poor quality in return, I refuse to pay them a cent.

>This is where someone chimes in with something snarky related to offline viewing (airplane) or not living in the US and having access to less comments. This is true. It's also largely irrelevant. If you think those are the primary reasons users torrent then I'd challenge you to back it up with statistics.

I don't think it is fair to leave it to the other side to come up with statistics. However, I think torrentfreak has done an excellent job reporting on piracy over the years. Here are some stats you may find interesting:

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharers-buy-30-more-music-than... [2] https://torrentfreak.com/find-out-whos-using-the-pirate-bay-...

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#116

Post by ripter »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #78
lvs wrote: post #12

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but…

I call bullshit. Absolute bullshit. If I gave you a credit card that gave you unlimited access to digital content you probably wouldn't be complaining. Certainly not if you live in the US or much of Europe. If you have a $69 AppleTV then iTunes is a spectacular user experience. Search for almost anything you want and hit play. If it didn't cost $5 to rent a movie it's superior to torrents. This is where someone chime…

I own an AppleTV with iTunes. It sucks. AppleTV has the worst interface of any of my streaming devices.

As an American, I try NOT to pirate. I'll try Netflix, HBOGo, Comedy Central, and cable tv. If i can't find it on any of those, then I'll consider going through the hassle of pirating it.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#117

Post by EC1 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #112
abandonliberty wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate how this is more secure?

Its not more secure, you are just less liable. If you DL via torrents you automatically share the content as well. So you are not just DL illegal content, but also distributing it.

Only if you seed right?

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#118

Post by task_queue »

zanny wrote: post #97
task_queue wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be less incentive when developers are raided and brought to court for their high crimes against the industry. Why not have the FBI go after the pirates instead of changing the structure of their business? It works well for them when it comes to unlicensed reproductions and hardware that facilitates piracy. If Popcorn time could turn a dime while playing the game legally, and become a threat like Netflix wa…

This is a great strategy. As the dozens of popcorn time forks have shown us it not only does not work, but it is also taking intelligent nonviolent programmers and ruining their lives in prisons around the world. The MPAA and friends couldn't look more evil if they wore a fake mustache and tried twirling it.

It works great if your intention is to intimidate and fragment communities that promote widespread piracy into irrelevance.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#119

Post by pbhjpbhj »

digi_owl wrote: post #95
higherpurpose wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The saddest part is that if they wanted they could adopt a hybrid central seed/P2P model, too, and be able to offer HD content without overwhelming their servers (in fact there more would people watch a certain episode at a given time, the better it would work ).

From elsewhere i have gotten the impression that some central legal figures within the business have some kind of stuck up idea about counting copies. There was a company trying to offer cloud based DVR service, and found that the only way they could get big media legal approval was to not use deduplication of any kind. This meant that their storage costs skyrocketed.

I think this is to do with media controllers (the managers of the megacorps) predicating value on number of copies reproduced. Shows are not to be allowed to be given only the value of production but must be talked up to have a value according to the number of copies - the more expensive the copies can be made to appear the more realistic it seems that a copy should cost more.

Charging $20 per viewer for content that cost $0.20 per viewer to make is hard; you have to pay off politicians to maintain that sort of control.

If content creation is pushed to a point where the actors, production team, etc. just get a seriously good wage and no further profits are produced then there's no place for media magnates. They must do everything to push against the concept of economy of scale.

I'm imagining a utopia in which a $50M movie takes $100M, everyone gets a bonus (down to the caterers and toilet cleaners), the people who front it get 10%, the rest is fed back in to other projects and the movie is now in the public domain.

We need to support content creators not make those who control the media even more ridiculously wealthy.

Then we have people like the car manufacturer controllers not happy to make piles of money from the effort of the people who work beneath them they want to cripple the product and make cars impossible to repair ...

If you ever buy a supercar society should have you stripped naked and left to beg for scraps in a favela whilst all your personal assets are liquidised to feed the poor.

/rant

[Dammit, I'm really ready to go off on one, enjoy the rants of an over-tired slightly drunk person. Free at source! License: CC0!!]

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#120

Post by anigbrowl »

return0 wrote: post #74
StavrosK wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0 Sure, but I already pay Netflix. If I had to pay a bit more and it included everything that's on Popcorn Time, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Then download the torrent and tip the producer somehow. Why pay for another service that is clearly not needed? I actually thought someone should have already built a startup selling 'virtual tickets'.

tip the producer somehow

The most anyone has ever raised that way (following a particularly egregious leaking of a film before release in Russia, albeit probably for political reasons) is $14,000. I don't personally know anyone who's made any money from tips, and it's not exactly a promising business model.

https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/02/02/leviathan-collects-1-mi...

Post reply on HN