The MPAA is a multi-billion dollar bully, that's the long and short of it. PopcornTime has never itself been guilty of copyright violation, even if its users have been, and the MPAA ought to know better. Even if they were going after it for showing copyrighted posters or frames in their screenshots, that's frivolous as hell and clearly covered by fair use. What they're really doing is bullying: they don't like what this application does, even though they know it's legal, so they'll utilize an broken law which is absolutely ripe for one-sided abuse by copyright holders to screw the little guy, knowing there's no oversight and will be no reprecussions for their behavior.
Copyright must be abolished. The fact that anything created today will never enter the public domain within any of our lifetimes proves that the system has failed. We have an obligation to exercise civil disobedience to protest the broken system. I will shed no tears for billionares caught up in the flack. They never shed a tear for the tens of thousands of people they screwed with expensive lawsuits, nor the billions they screwed out of their rightful inheritance of the collective works of humanity.
"You run Erowid, which is a comprehensive reporting about all sorts of drugs, what they cause, their interactions, their prices, and all details. You don't sell drugs anywhere, and minimally comply with required statues."
Is Erowid selling drugs?
Did I just commit a crime? I don't think so. Call the cops if you disagree, I'll stand in court for it.
I'll admit, I'm not actually sure where the law would fall in that situation, but I think the police would have a lot of questions for the car manufacturer, and I'd be on their side.
How easy do I have to make it to commit crimes before I've made it too easy? The answer is it doesn't matter. There is no scenario in which I am legally at fault if you commit a crime with tools you got from me.
The key phrase is "significant non-infringing use". Shoes are obviously not built specifically to enable people to commit crimes. And most people who use shoes are not using them to commit crimes.
PopcornTime was built specifically to enable copyright infringement. The vast majority of people using PopcornTime do so to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted material.
This bit doesn't even have anything to do with the DMCA. (Regardless, I agree that this particular case is an abuse of the DMCA takedown process.)
I despise our current copyright regime, though perhaps not with the vehemence that you have. But no matter what I wish the state of things would be, this is the law, and this is how judges have interpreted it ever since Napster showed up in their courtrooms (at least).
If I serve you alcohol and then you drive drunk...
"The majority of states consider bars and restaurants to be liable for injuries or fatalities caused by an intoxicated individual who's over-imbibed in their establishment." [1]
What the courts actually said is that enticing can get you secondary liability (contributory and/or vicarious). They maintain that there is a distinction between contributory infringement, vicarious infringement, and direct infringement. The DMCA takedown procedure is only defined for direct infringement.
From the Grokster summary ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/545/913/ ):
“One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses.”
It doesn't get you out of all trouble, but it does get you out of charges of direct infringement.
> The law agrees with me in former case, and disagrees with me in the latter.
and less about this:
> I'm also pointing out that in clear-cut cases of the DMCA, I think the law is wrong, and I side with the defendant, in spite of the law. The law is not the arbiter of my personal code of ethics.
I suspect we have similar opinions of the DMCA, but would very much prefer if we didn't conflate "I dislike the DMCA" with "I think this is an abuse of the DMCA (specifically: regardless of my opinion on the DMCA, I think this is an overreach)". It's like if we were discussing whether a person sentenced to death is guilty or not, and you came in and said, "I can't possibly see why we could side against the victim, I don't like them, the death penalty is stupid". All of which might even be an opinion shared by the people discussing it, but not only are you off topic but you're doing your argument a disservice as you're tying it to something that's not what you are arguing.
(I'm being a stickler on this, because like I said, I likely agree with your viewpoint and would very much rather you not allow people to come up with lazy responses to you.)
Take a look at Fonovisa vs Cherry Auction, a landmark case in developing the concept of “contributory copyright infringement” and “vicarious infringement.” This was a key precedent in the case that effectively shut down Napster.
Cherry Auction was a swap meet that was the site of the sale of counterfeit recordings (probably cassette tapes, it was early 90s) including counterfeits infringing on copyrights held by Fonovisa Inc. It was established that the swap meet knew that alleged piracy was going on; among other things there had been a massive police raid after which such sales continued.
The swap meet’s position was essentially what you are saying — I don’t do any infringement, not my problem. A district court agreed but was overturned on appeal, with the appeals court reasoning, to oversimplify, that the swap meet routinely patrolled vendors, gated admission by consumers, and reaped financial benefit in the form of rent — essentially it had the knowledge and power to stop the infringement, and profited by failing to do so, therefore it was a party to the infringement.
I don’t explain any of this to say the takedown here is necessarily right, just to give some context. And admittedly context only applicable to the app’s US legality. Namely, it’s not enough for PopcornTime to not itself infringe, under the law as now understood. (IANAL, btw! Just followed some cases.) It needs to be in a position where it is not materially contributing to the infringement — knowingly and directly.
I believe vicarious infringement has a financial benefit prong (which popcorn time as a volunteer effort may lack) but that contributory infringement does not. At least based on the wording in Fonovisa which is almost 25 years old https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Fon...
In the Napster case, Napster’s control of the central search index proved key in establishing it enabled and knew about infringement. The particulars of how popcorntime works are presumably important in establish whether it is knowingly and directly enabling infringement. And liability for github if any is going to be murkier — they are some hops out here from the infringement of (some) popcorntime users.
An extreme overstep of jurisdiction by the USA government on behalf of MPAA.
Maybe walk back the rhetoric, calling people who disagree with you "bootlickers", etc.
Now, if you want to talk about synthesising "copyrighted" drugs and giving them away, or even selling them for a fraction of the price, I'm with you 100%.
Patented; it's called "patented". And thanks to the magic of supply and demand, even selling them for same price would help, if not as much.
>It isn’t like someone has locked away a Van Gogh painting
It is exactly like this.
Movie studios are most concerned that this could even lead to people pirating content without realizing that they're doing something illegal.
Ultimately, choosing a centralized provider versus elsewhere doesn't have a lot of impact. The MPAA can send notices to your hosting provider, your domain registrar, your internet service provider, or ultimately, get the police to raid your house/office and confiscate your personal machines.
The idea that the Internet exists outside of the real physical world, and you can just do whatever you want is a fantasy sold by science fiction, but exactly that: A fantasy.