popcorn time piracy spooked netflix down

'But I do not think that it is an existential problem for Hollywood, like it was for the music industry.'ĭenise Mann, an associate professor in UCLA's Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, maintains that Hollywood's problems come from different sources. 'Piracy is having some effect on movie sales,' said James Gibson, an expert on copyright issues and a law professor at the University of Richmond. The National Association of Theatre owners expects 2015 to be the highest grossing year for films in history, with $10.9 billion in box office gross sales by the end of the year. By 2014, visits had fallen to 1.27 billion visits. Revenues, however, have remained steady or increased, and the summer of 2015 is on track to be the most lucrative in Hollywood history. In 2002, Americans and Canadians went to movie theaters nearly 1.6 billion times, which is an all-time record. 'We are protecting the creativity and the jobs in the film industry,' Gantman said.īut is piracy through sites like Popcorn Time really harming Hollywood? Gantman says his job is to make sure the film industry isn't decimated by piracy. That's a lot of lost revenue for the film industry. Other studies that the MPAA cites estimate that 710 million pirated films and shows were shared on BitTorrent (a protocol to share files peer-to-peer) in the US during the last year, including 416 million movies. 'Fighting piracy is a major issue for us,' he said, citing film industry-funded studies that claim that nearly a quarter of the total bandwidth in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific countries is used for copyright infringing. Howard Gantman, vice president of the MPAA, refuses to speak about Popcorn Time as an isolated case he instead criticizes all sites and software that make copyrighted content available for free.

Related: Ashley Madison Hackers Release Info of Man Who Paid to Erase His Profile 'The investigative and enforcement effort required real-time, cross-border collaboration on three continents – and may have prevented Popcorn from becoming a major piracy threat before it could become popular.' 'The Content Protection team scored a major victory in shutting down key developers of 'Popcorn Time,'' the MPAA update to the major Hollywood studios says. In the US, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) played a key role in shutting down Popcorn Time, as evidenced from a 2014 quarterly update that was revealed in the Sony email hack. In some countries, such as the UK, Popcorn Time has been blocked. It has been difficult for the film industry to get the Popcorn Time site taken down since, in the US, simply downloading the software is legal, while using it to download or stream a pirated film is illegal. In Denmark, two men were arrested because they ran websites that provided information on how to use Popcorn Time. Netflix called the rise of Popcorn Time in the Netherlands 'sobering.' In its letter to shareholders in January, Netflix wrote, 'Piracy continues to be one of our biggest competitors.' It is not only Hollywood studios that are alarmed. On August 16, the production company of the Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler sued 11 Popcorn Time users in a nearly identical lawsuit. 'Survivor has been downloaded… hundreds of thousands of times with over 10,000 instances of piracy traced to locations in the State of Oregon.' 'Popcorn Time exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to steal copyrighted content,' the company's complaint to the court said. Survivor Productions, which made Survivor, a 2015 spy thriller starring Pierce Brosnan, filed a complaint against 16 Popcorn Time users in the US District Court in Oregon on August 20. With the site's success, film production companies have sued users of the service. Abad and other developers say they don't know how many times the software has been downloaded, but the site has 141,000 fans on Facebook, and nearly 40,000 Twitter followers. Popcorntime.io is the flagship among these sites, and Abad supports and considers it to be the true successor to the original Popcorn Time. I never wanted to get into serious trouble because of this project.'Īlthough Abad and his team shut down the original Popcorn Time, several international 'fork' sites - sites that use the original open-source code but continue to modify and build on it - have continued to thrive on the web. 'Popcorn Time was a fun thing that we created for our friends, for our families, but it became too big. 'I don't know how he found us,' Abad said. had visited each of their professional LinkedIn webpages. They soon found out that a lawyer from Warner Bros. While his father told Abad he should make money from the site, his mother became worried, as was Abad and the other developers.

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Popcorn time piracy spooked netflix down