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Comment by middleclick | Hacker News Reader

Is this legal in Canada? Because this constitutes streaming and not uploading, so it should be legal?

This is not streaming, this is just torrenting and it includes uploading. The only difference between this and other torrent clients is that it downloads torrent files sequentially by default and opens the file as soon as you have enough data to start watching. From the FAQ:

Popcorn Time works using torrents, fair enough. Am I seeding while watching a movie?

Indeed, you are. You're going to be uploading bits and bits of the movie for as long as you're watching it on Popcorn Time.

http://getpopcornti.me/faq

This is what (sadly) puts a hole in the concept. Because most of the tyrant ISPs don't provide symmetric connections, you are never going to maintain a 1.0 ratio throughout a viewing, so you depend on seed boxes to keep the download demands from crippling popular videos. Unless they add a daemon option to keep seeding when not using the app, users are always leechers.

Not necessarily. It doesn't matter how much faster your download speed is as long as your upload speed is fast enough to "reverse stream". i.e. for a 700mb 1h40 movie your upload speed needs to be ~120kB/s, which most people have now (at least in the UK)

That is only if you always watch your movie start to finish. If you don't consume the whole film that number goes up dramatically, say if you watched 5 minutes at a 5MB/1MB connection, then you could download 1.5GB (probably half the movie) while only seeding 300MB back.

The Canadian copyright lawyer I talked to says no:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/popcorn-time-is-like-netfl...

I haven't look at the technical details, but it does use Bittorrent, so you're most likely peering and seeding to other users too.

Yep. You're definitely also uploading.

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