Popcorn Time has risen to fame in the past few months, capturing the MPAA's attention

Jul 12, 2014 19:31 GMT  ·  By

The fact that the MPAA really doesn’t like pirates comes as no surprise, especially since it’s been hunting them for years. In the latest effort to put a stop to people illegally getting their hands on copyrighted content, the Motion Picture Association of America has managed to remove the repositories of several Popcorn Time apps from GitHub.

With the help of a takedown request, the MPAA has managed to put a small dent into the Popcorn Time phenomenon, which has managed to attract quite a large number of fans in a short time span.

According to TorrentFreak, GitHub complied quite fast with the demand since only a few hours passed between the time the notice was issued and the time the repositories magically vanished.

“We are writing to notify you of, and request your assistance in addressing the extensive copyright infringement of motion pictures and television shows that is occurring by virtue of the operation and further development of the GitHub projects Popcorn Time, and Time4Popcorn,” the MPAA wrote in the takedown notice.

As a reminder, Popcorn Time offers BitTorrent-powered streaming with the help of a Netflix-like interface that makes it easy for users to pick a show they want to watch by indicating the series and episode without having to use an actual BitTorrent client. Obviously, the idea quickly became a hit among pirates across the world who preferred to download one of the Popcorn Time apps and stream their shows and movies.

Considering that the alpha version for one of these apps mentioned above has users trying out casting the content over to the TV over Chromecast makes the service that much more enticing.

Alas, the MPAA is hard at work and trying to put a dent in this new trend by asking GitHub to not only remove the “popcorn-official” and “time4popcorn” projects, but also all related forks. The original Popcorn Time repository remains intact, however, as the publication points out.

What will the MPAA’s action do? Well, it will basically slow down the development of the software. For the time being, those who have Popcorn Time installed aren’t reporting any disruptions, and the applications themselves are still available for download on their associated websites.

Time4Popcorn previously announced that it managed to attract millions of users in just a few months and the app is getting tens of thousands of downloads each day, indicating that it is, indeed, a total hit among pirates.

[Update] Time4pocorn had to drop the site due to some legal issues and has moved to popcorn-time.se. You can read more about this here.