A few weeks ago, several movie companies sued a widely used Popcorn Time fork, as well as VPN.ht.
When the app's official website disappeared a few days later, most assumed that the developers had decided to stop developing it. However, Popcorn Time plans to return.
For more than seven years, Popcorn Time has been a thorn in the side of movie studios big and small.
Netflix for Pirates offers an easy-to-use application that opens the door to a library of thousands of streaming movies and TV shows.
The Motion Picture Association (MPA) recognized this threat early on and pressured the original developers to stop developing the application. This worked initially but is now slow as the project is open source and has started to grow rapidly by others.
Today, Popcorn Time lives through many forks of the original project. The most popular is PopcornTime.app, which has continued since the original developers stopped, with various new features over the years.
Running such a project is a challenge. Film companies are watching closely and looking for opportunities to close it. Last year, for example, MPA sent a removal notice to GitHub to remove the official Popcorn Time repository.
It was bad news for developers, but it was not something they could not get over. Popcorn Time successfully submitted a request to the DMCA and two weeks later GitHub restored the project.
A few weeks ago another more worrying problem arose. In a lawsuit filed in a federal court in Virginia, several film companies have accused the anonymous administrators of Popcorntime.app of massive copyright infringement.
This case continues and the court quickly issued a preliminary order to the registrar to lock the domain name so that it can not be transferred. At the same time, the Popcorntime.app website disappeared.
But this week, one of Popcorn Time's developers told Torrentfreak that the site is planning to return . How that will happen remains a mystery.
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
