In a major move to stop movie piracy, the Motion Picture Association of America has stopped all illegal activities by "Popcorn Time." This includes the torrent sites located in Canada and New Zealand that provide the contents. The move was in-line with court orders that the MPAA has won.
"Popcorn Time and YTS are illegal platforms that exist for one clear reason: to distribute stolen copies of the latest motion pictures and television shows without compensating the people who worked so hard to make them," said MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd, in an official press statement.
In the month of July alone, there were about 1.5 million visitors to PopcornTime.io and downloaded the Popcorn Time app, according to ComScore data. These visitors were then able to view thousands of pirated movies and television shows, the statement reads.
Popcorn Time, also known as "BitTorrent for dummies," functions similarly like Netflix, where a visitor of the site simply clicks on what they want to watch. The problem is, all the movies in the Popcorn Time app are all copyrighted materials, and it is therefore illegal to watch the shows, even to stream it.
Lawsuits were filed in the U.S. earlier this year when "Survivor Productions" filed a complaint against 16 anonymous Comcast subscribers who have watched the "Survivor" movie, which stars Pierce Brosnan, according to a report by Arstechnica.
The MPAA has also taken credit for the stoppage of YTS or YIFY-torrents, another popular torrent site. YTS had stopped working around mid-October, which is in pursuant of a court order in New Zealand. According to TorrentFreak, the well-known YIFY group is also responsible for Demonii, the largest BitTorrent tracker.
Many torrent users believe that for the time being, BitTorrent downloads will likely slow down because of the latest legal moves by MPAA to put a stop to all illegal activities in the torrent community.
