Parker Higgins, of Five Useful Articles, on this summer’s newest hit, Popcorn Time versus the MPAA:
It’s summer blockbuster season, and Hollywood’s in its annual bind—it’s gotta bring back the old familiar faces that people know and love, but make ‘em bigger than ever. So how about this: you’ve seen copyright liability, and secondary liability, but what about tertiary liability? What a twist.
That, in a sense, is what the MPAA is alleging in a takedown-notice […] demanding removal of the Popcorn Time source code. Popcorn Time is a much ballyhooed file-sharing application…
The MPAA argument goes that Popcorn Time users are infringing copyright, so the Popcorn Time developers do diluted infringement, so Github is engaged in Infringement Lite, and presumably the chain goes all the way back to the miners shoveling coal to power the data centers on electrons buzzing with homeopathic levels of infringing charge.
Github complied with the “takedown,” so the repositories are unavailable and the pirates have become productive Netflix-subscribing members of society and the blood feuds have ended and the graves of the fallen, those victims of piracy, have run over with wildflowers, hoorah, hoorah, blessed be the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forever and ever, amen!
Hoo lordy. After something like that, I need an iced tea and a rocking chair. That whole post is hot hot fire.