The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has succeeded in shutting down several major torrent sites, including Popcorn Time, a service popularly known as "Netflix for pirates".
With court orders in Canada and New Zealand, the lobbying organisation and trade group shut down both PopcornTime.io (whose app still works despite online content being unavailable) and popular torrent index YTS, home to YIFY torrents.
"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 CEO Chris Dodd in a statement. "Development of high-quality entertainment requires significant investment of time and resources, and creators rely on a fair and lawful ecosystem that minimises the significant impact of piracy."
Ease of use
While PopcornTime and YTS are by no means the only players in the piracy industry, both have drawn attention for dramatically streamlining the practice of pirating videos online.
YIFY, one of the top sources for pirated videos in the world before its recent shutdown, established a presence as a reliable source for good quality, easy-to-use and quick-to-download video content by providing high-quality rips of a wide array of movies and TV shows, which were relatively quick to download due to their small file size. The reliability of YIFY torrents meant potential pirates were less deterred by the often poor quality or faulty nature of pirated content.
Meanwhile, Popcorn Time's multi-platform streaming programme, whose design and user interface closely resemble those of Netflix, made piracy appear more legitimate by concealing its messy back-end. "Users didn't need to know how to use peer-to-peer download programs, or search for content in a sea of dubious magnet links," illustrates T C Sottek for The Verge.
What makes the MPAA's shutdown a particularly heavy blow to both these services and their users is that Popcorn Time pulled the majority of its content from YTS.
Room at the top
Yet the MPAA's triumph is likely to be short-lived, as rival streaming and torrenting services rush to fill a new gap in the market.
"While movie companies around the world will have hoped that disenchanted users simply switched off Popcorn Time at the first signs of trouble and signed up with Netflix, life just isn't that simple," writes anonymous journalist "Andy" for TorrentFreak.
"There's now room at the top of the unofficial streaming market for a new challenger," Andy notes.
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