Popcorn Time streams movies from torrents
Downloading copyrighted material through torrents may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk.
The above quote is an opening statement at the Popcorn Time website. I think that there is no question about it, but the first question that will come to our minds when the words ‘movie, torrent, and instantly’ meet together in one sentence is simple: is this legal?
While the majority of the worlds population is not scared of copyright infringement, and happy download whatever they like – there are people who’ve had to pay up a lot of money for their ‘mistakes’, or rather choices seem more appropriate. Popcorn Time does not advise for any illegal activity, and is not responsive for what you download and view through the program.
It’s an interesting concept, and it’s also meant to be working on all major operating systems, except for mobile. I think mobile is definitely something to look into, if the guys from PT are going to take this project seriously, and have a safe passage through the copyright issues that may arise.
The way it works is really simple, there are no actual torrents being served by the program itself, and instead it is creating API requests to sites like:
- RottenTomatoes for movies metadata.
- PirateBay Recent popular movies list.
- YIFY movie torrents API.
- OpenSubtitles for subtitles
- TheMovieDB for movies metadata.
- SubtitleSeeker for subtitles.
I’ve tried doing some research, and it appears that the next feature to be added to the live features is going to be the ability to watch TV shows as well, sounds pretty exciting. It’s built with peerflix which is based on Node.js, and is completely open source for those who’re interested.
UPDATE: 12/04/2014
It appears that there is a lot of heated things happening around this startup, and for the most part – it seems that the government isn’t liking what they’re seeing. However, the project is remaining active and there seems to be no way of stopping it.
You’re probably aware that the original homepage has been discontinued and has a message written on it, explaining the whole situation as to why it had to be done.
Piracy is not a people problem. It’s a service problem. A problem created by an industry that portrays innovation as a threat to their antique recipe to collect value. It seems to everyone that they just don’t care.
The solution, of course, is available at both GitHub and the new Popcorn Time! website.
I highly recommend that you check against fraud, and other things when trying to work with this application, it’s hard to trust 3rd party services, but all of the links in this post are legitimate and I wouldn’t try to fool my community.
Stay safe, and good luck watching both movies and tv shows!
