Popcorn Time is the Newest Platform Whose Users are Under Legal Fire - The UpStream

Popcorn Time is the Newest Platform Whose Users are Under Legal Fire

posted Sunday Aug 23, 2015 by Scott Ertz

Popcorn Time is the Newest Platform Whose Users are Under Legal Fire

When RIAA took offense to BitTorrent, while they obviously didn't understand what the company does, they did have something right: it can be misused. One of the products that is misusing the protocol is a site called Popcorn Time. If you have not encountered the site you're in luck. Using the BitTorrent protocol, Popcorn Time allows you to stream television and movies with or without legal access.

Clearly, it was not going to take long before the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) took action. That action came this week in the form of a lawsuit, whose defendants are named as "Anonymous Users of Popcorn Time: Does 1 - 11." Obviously this is a suit focusing on copyright infringement, as the defendants are being sued for accessing torrented, protected content.

Cobbler Nevada, LLC, the plaintiff, is looking for a jury trial, but needs one thing before they can do that: to know who the defendants are. They are seeking a subpoena for Comcast, demanding they turn over the names attached to the IP addresses currently named "Does 1 - 11." Comcast has refused information requests like this until a federal judge required it, so it is possible they could put up a fight, but not under the circumstances.

As the owner of NBC Universal, Comcast actually has a dog in this race. Helping to make it less desirable to use a service like this could directly affect their bottom line, encouraging people to, instead, use a service like Hulu, in which they are also partial owners.

The plaintiff is using a warning on the Popcorn Time website as proof that the defendants knew ahead of time what they were doing was illegal. Given that RIAA never had any success with suits like this one, it will be interesting to see if the MPAA can change that statistic. The moral of the story is, don't use Popcorn Time, as users are being watched.

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