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. Several of the other files that are mentioned have nothing to do with Butter.
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Full article is here : MPAA takedown efforts target legal Popcorn Time spin-offs
TorrentFreak – 03/15/2016