![]() The fact that this spin-off of Popcorn Time is open source – no revenue, no ads - actually works against the film industry. The difference between Napster and Popcorn Time is that Napster tried to build a business around piracy. They fought tooth and nail to make sure that the format you bought music on was the 12-song, $20 CD, of which they received the vast majority of the revenue - not the artist. The music industry would not let go of the existing structure - the bloated, overpriced CDs, the relationships with record stores and radio stations, the king-making power that went all the way back to the Beatles. The technology that brought about Napster made said piracy quick, easy, and free. Pre-Napster, there were countless ways to pirate music, going back to the analog tape deck. But I’m convinced that the music industry died not because of piracy, but because of the industry’s late, greedy, and misguided response to the technology that spawned piracy. As a former musician who made money both from live performance and publishing, I’m of the mind that art is not free because good, true art costs time and money to produce. How the film industry handles this Popcorn Time remnant will have a huge impact on what the industry looks like just a few short years from now. So we arrive at the moment where another aging dinosaur must finally come to terms with technology and disruption. Within hours, the source code was available on GitHub and is now being maintained by anonymous developers, the kind of hackers that are going to be difficult, if not impossible, to find and get all litigious with. Immediately after Popcorn Time went down, it got forked. ![]() However, that was then, and technology has since evolved. That war was bloody for everyone involved, resulting in lawsuits against Napster, lawsuits against Napster clones, lawsuits against downloaders, and lawsuits against mothers of downloaders that resulted in ridiculous sums of money being awarded. This should be a wake-up call.Īs you might expect, Hollywood flexed their muscles and coerced the original Popcorn Time developers to shut it down, much like the initial shot in the long war between the RIAA and Napster back in the 2000s. For the record, I didn’t select a movie, but only because I just don’t have the time. I opened it to an interface that looked a little like Netflix for movies that aren’t yet available on DVD. ![]() I clicked the link and downloaded the app.
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