Which torrent or emulator developers have been sued? I can't think of this having ever happened.
Napster was centralized, that was a different set of facts. I don't know what happened to Limewire.
I watched the Mega Upload saga closely when it all played out. The government's case was pretty flimsy (even without accounting for obvious problems with jurisdiction). They argued that employees of Mega Upload were aware of infringing content, maintained lists of infringing content, made infringing content easy to find, and were generally just an illegal file sharing site. It's quite a fascinating case, it's been ongoing for over 7 years now.
Ultimately, why is it any business of the government to safeguard the precious movies? They should have to run their own security and settle matters civilly. There should be absolutely no criminal penalties for copyright infringement.
These kinds of theories have been roundly thrown out in court. What really matters is whether the primary purpose of your app is copyright infringement. It's clear from any "average" person that the getpopcorntime website is promoting the ability to watch copyrighted movies for free. Contrast that with bitorrent itself, which is clearly used for tons of infringement, but it also has a clear legitimate purpose WRT large file distribution, and importantly it doesn't promote itself by shouting "watch free movies" from the rooftops.
I think the Frostwire fork is still around, but I really have no idea how large the Gnutella network is these days. I imagine the primary use case for Frostwire these days is as a Bittorrent client.
I was actually 1 of the 5 full-time Limewire developers when the Grokster Supreme Court case was decided. I left Limewire sometime between when the direct legal threats started and when the lawsuits were actually filed.
As I remember, the CEO panicked for a week or two and looked certain to fold the company as soon as the direct threats started coming in. He ran a hedge fund and a brokerage, and started lots of side projects like Limewire and a non-profit to promote a bike-friendly NYC. Limewire was a pure liability to his fortune, and the rational thing to do would have been to just fold Limewire and walk away. Somehow he mustered the courage to fight the lawsuits. My understanding is that sometime after I left, the recording industry made a credible threat to pierce the corporate veil and directly go after the newly married COO/CTO with a kid on the way. Once the COO/CTO was over a barrel and willing to say whatever the recording industry wanted him to say, the CEO was forced into a protracted negotiated settlement.
I wasn't a party to any of the talks, but the CEO told me directly that the initial meeting went something like "What kind of content filtering is acceptable to you? Can you give us a blacklist of hashes or audio fingerprints?" "No, you must sell us your company, no negotiation." The CEO seemed to think the recording industry was genuinely concerned that they needed to nip open culture and liberally licensed media in the bud or they might find themselves disintermediated.
Please cite you scotus ruling.
"Direct" is the term the judges have adopted to refer to the infringement that is explicitly defined by statute, due to the necessity of distinguishing it from the common law derived categories of contributory and vicarious infringement. The statute does not need to use the term "direct infringement" for that term to have real legal meaning.
I've already quoted the Supreme Court on this elsewhere in the thread. The MGM v. Grokster case (2005) included:
> When a widely shared product is used to commit infringement, it may be impossible to enforce rights in the protected work effectively against all direct infringers, so that the only practical alternative is to go against the device’s distributor for secondary liability on a theory of contributory or vicarious infringement. One infringes contributorily by intentionally inducing or encouraging direct infringement, and infringes vicariously by profiting from direct infringement while declining to exercise the right to stop or limit it. Although “[t]he Copyright Act does not expressly render anyone liable for [another’s] infringement,” Sony, 464 U.S., at 434, these secondary liability doctrines emerged from common law principles and are well established in the law, e.g., id., at 486. Pp. 10—13.
( https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-480.ZS.html )
The court is citing and quoting an earlier decision, Sony v. Universal City Studios (1984), the landmark case establishing that it was legal to use a VCR for timeshifting. That decision made numerous references to a distinction between direct and contributory infringement, such as:
> Justice Holmes stated that the producer had "contributed" to the infringement of the copyright, and the label "contributory infringement" has been applied in a number of lower court copyright cases involving an ongoing relationship between the direct infringer and the contributory infringer at the time the infringing conduct occurred. In such cases, as in other situations in which the imposition of vicarious liability is manifestly just, the "contributory" infringer was in a position to control the use of copyrighted works by others and had authorized the use without permission from the copyright owner.
( https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/464/417 )
And that's referring to a 1911 decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Kalem Company v. Harper Brothers ( https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/222/55 ).
So "direct infringement" is a pretty well-known concept despite not being named as such in statute.
> Held: 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.
"Sometimes distributing software can be copyright infringement, if you induce end users to use the software to infringe copyrighted works."
Title of post is wrong.
It's clear from the takedown notice submitted by the MPA that (a) they are alleging that PopCornTime aids copyright infringement, not that the code itself is a copy, however the counternotice from the devs just says that (b) the code itself is original, but doesn't address that it is used and configured to scrape torrent files.
In short, though, I wouldn't hold my breath for PopCornTime. Napster and Limewire got taken down back in the day too for the same rationale.