Another called MovieHive is an Android app that’s a far cry from the selection and ease of use of Popcorn Time. A site called FliXanity essentially cloned Netflix’s look and streams pirated content, albeit at a really low resolution. It is the epitome of online guerrilla warfare.Īnd Popcorn Time isn’t alone. They’re not charging for the program or incorporating ads. Popcorn Time is Napster for video without a company that is trying to turn it into a business. The developers can go underground and distribute their creations under multiple names.

There isn’t a single entity here that Hollywood’s lawyers can attack. Popcorn Time is simply a pretty face on a community-driven project. Besides that, the program leans on an API released by a popular pirated movie site that has so far successfully evaded the MPAA’s wrath. The entire program is on GitHub, where any developer can access the code and make it their own. Popcorn Time is just the start and it’s not the first to provide an easy way to consume pirated content. Want to watch the blockbuster? Buy the Blu-ray or download it from The Pirate Bay. Want to watch a sequel to a blockbuster or a knock-off Disney movie? Go to Netflix. Yet these legitimate services often lack top-tier content. The runaway success of Netflix, Amazon Video and Hulu proves that. Consumers want content on demand for a fair price. The current state of movie piracy is centered around archaic distribution. Apple made it easy to grab the latest music, anywhere, at any time and it turned a generation of music pirates into, at the very least, a generation aware of the alternatives. The RIAA spent an untold fortune fighting the Napster generation until Apple turned the rippers into buyers with iTunes. Does the practice speak to a larger issue? Absolutely. Yet strictly speaking, piracy is as much stealing as is taking a photograph of art with the intent to reproduce it. Once installed, however, the program throws a warning screen forcing the user to essentially agree that it’s a bit shady. The creators of the original Popcorn Time stated emphatically that it’s perfectly legal to run the app because neither you nor the app “hold” the movies – the Internet holds them. Popcorn Time makes it as easy to watch pirated content as Napster did to download songs. There’s no mess or fuss - you press play. It makes watching pirated movies as easy as firing up Netflix. A piece of software appeared last week called Popcorn Time. Video piracy is on the verge of having its Napster moment. The RIAA would have fought a war on a thousand fronts. Imagine what would have happened if Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker had released the source code, allowing any developer to essentially copy and build upon his software. If there were a NapsterStanford, a NapsterMIT, or a Napster for your high school completely independent from, yet just as powerful as, the original. Imagine for a moment if Napster were cloned hundreds of times.

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