MPAA Takedown Efforts Target Legal Popcorn Time Spin-Offs

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Popcorn Time's 'legal' spin-off Butter is at risk of losing access to its codebase hosted at GitHub. The developer platform has informed several projects that some of their code has been flagged by the MPAA as copyright infringing, including a fork managed by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture.

When the MPAA shut down the main PopcornTime.io fork late last year, many of its developers switched to the project’s ‘legal’ spin-off Butter.

Unlike Popcorn-Time, Butter doesn’t include any links to pirated movies and TV-shows. Instead, it acts as a general purpose streaming tool and actively promotes content that’s freely published by indie filmmakers.

Despite this neutral setup, a recent series of takedown requests Hollywood’s MPAA sent to GitHub threatens to pull the project’s code offline.

Correspondence seen by TorrentFreak shows that the MPAA has been asking GitHub to remove the repository of the recently revived PopcornTime.sh, as well as all related forks.

“There are multiple ‘forks’ of Popcorn Time, all of which are 100% unlicensed and infringing, and many of which have been subject to litigation and court orders around the world confirming their infringement,” the MPAA informs GitHub.

“Popcorntime.sh is one of the more recent infringing ‘forks,’ and we attached several specific examples of that site’s infringement to our prior letter. The Project provides to any member of the public the software needed to develop and release additional infringing Popcorn Time forks, and thereby enables infringement on a massive scale.”

Interestingly the notices don’t mention any Butter related projects by name. But since the PopcornTime.sh fork uses code from Butter, Github has also involved several ‘legal’ spin-offs.

In their notices the MPAA lists several files that are “most clearly and unambiguously designed” to deliver or find infringing content, including package.json and torrent_collection.js which are sourced from Butter.

 

MPAA’s takedown request
 

 

A few hours ago the notices were forwarded to several Butter related projects, including a fork operated by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, giving the operators 24 hours to respond before their entire codebase is pulled.

A representative of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture informed us that they will release a statement on the issue in the near future.

At least one group of developers has already replied to GitHub pointing out that they are not a fork of the mentioned Popcorn Time application. In addition, it added that several of the allegedly infringing files are not part of the original Butter code.

Brazilian technology company Hacklab informed TorrentFreak that one of their repositories was targeted as well.

“Butter is a great technology that can reduce the cost of distributing videos and has the potential to boost the development of our local film industry. As a digital technology company we have to keep up with the most promising technology trends, and Butter is one of these,” Hacklab’s Luis Fagundes says.

“This notification is insane, as it’s directed to a different project and cites a bunch of files that do no violation at all. Unfortunately, the cost of this irresponsibility is high: it causes harm to developers and businesses who, instead of producing value to society, have to respond to a takedown threat,” he adds.

Talking to TorrentFreak, another developer explained that the MPAA’s description of the files is not totally accurate. The package.json file, for example, is not infringing and merely serves as the main entry point for the application.

The torrent_collection.js file, which isn’t enabled by default, allows users to add random torrent files to Butter but doesn’t link to any specific infringing material. The developers hope that their response will be sufficient to keep the project online.

Strangely enough, the people behind the PopcornTime.sh fork itself have not yet been contacted by GitHub at the time of writing and their repository remains online as well.(See update below).

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that GitHub is treating the issue very carefully. The MPAA has sent several requests over the past several weeks and Github has repeatedly requested further clarification and additional details.

However, despite GitHub’s vigilance the MPAA isn’t giving up, urging the developer platform to go above an beyond the DMCA to help combat potential copyright infirngements.

“We hope you agree that GitHub’s responsibility to not knowingly assist in a massive copyright infringement operation does not end with its DMCA policy,” the MPAA told the platform.

Update: A few minutes after publication TorrentFreak was informed that the official Popcorn Time repository also received a notification.

https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-takedown-efforts-target-legal-popcorn-time-spin-offs-160315/