[Trisquel-users] Is Popcorn Time Legal?

[h***@protonmail.com]

Hello dear friends,
Excuse me if this is not a good place to ask my question, but I thought I
could answer my question here.
I need a website to watch movies, there are many options available like
Netflix and Hulu, but these sites uses DRM technology!
I find ((popcorn time)) website and it's great, but my friends told me that
using this site is illegal, because it violates copyright law!
Popcorn time is a free software (with GPL v3 license) and source code
available in here: https://github.com/popcorn-official
please guide me... I have no idea. Is popcorn time legal or illegal? should I
use it or not?!
Thanks a lot...

[l***@dcc.ufmg.br]

The answer might depend on the legislation you live under. But it is almost
certainly "Popcorn Time is illegal". Now, you decide whether you should
respect a law that prevents you from sharing your culture.

Popcorn Time is not a website, it is a heavy client mainly bundling a
BitTorrent client and a video player.

In my humble opinion, the thread should have been started in
https://trisquel.info/forum/general-free-software-talk

[Mason Hock]

Post by l***@dcc.ufmg.br
But it is
almost certainly "Popcorn Time is illegal".

Is the software itself likely to be illegal? It can certainly be used to
illegally acquire and play copyrighted works, but so can other
BitTorrent clients and video players. I'm sure there are companies who
would like to ban BitTorrent clients and any video players that don't
impose DRM, but we're not there yet, are we?

[l***@dcc.ufmg.br]

Well, I am not a lawyer. Here is what Wikipedia reports on the topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time#Legality

[g***@riseup.net]

Post by l***@dcc.ufmg.br
Popcorn Time is not a website, it is a heavy client mainly bundling a

BitTorrent client and a video player.

It is the bloated version of peerflix, nothing more than a super heavy GUI
added to it. And it needs no GUI at all, it could not be more
straightforward. Highly recommended software btw ->
https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix

o/


* consider whether obeying an amoral law makes you moral or amoral.

[l***@dcc.ufmg.br]

Popcorn Time is more than a BitTorrent client. It presents thumbnails of
movies/series/animes/indies (in independent tabs), classified by genre, by
season (for series), ordered by popularity/year/IMDB ratings/etc., along with
the synopsis, the available resolutions, the available subtitles (it can be
configured to always play with subtitles, if available for your language), it
keeps track of what the user watched, of her "favorites", etc.

[Caleb Herbert]

Buying a DVD and playing it on your own Trisquel laptop is illegal.

[j***@bluehome.net]

Like most things, the real answer is "it depends."

Popcorn Time itself is a BitTorrent client. BitTorrent in and of itself
cannot be illegal any more than a photocopier could be. It's what people *do*
with it that determines whether their *actions* are. There are entirely legal
torrents. One example is http://www.publicdomaintorrents.info/ If someone
were to use something like Popcorn Time to obtain a video from there I would
be hard-pressed to say which law(s) were broken. That people might also use
it to transfer copies of other things without authorization should not change
this but sadly some seem to blur the distinction between the tool and the
actions.

[w***@icloud.com]

No popcorn time isn't legal if you are downloading or streaming copyrighted
material like movies or tv shows. How ever the likely hood of actually
getting caught is small.