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Comment by ghughes | Hacker News Reader

Editorialized title.

I enjoyed the part where they berate the other fork for "ripping off" their UI, which exists solely to facilitate piracy.

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> I enjoyed the part where they berate the other fork for "ripping off" their UI, which exists solely to facilitate piracy.

You missed their point. They are angry about the ripoff because they include malware in it and try to pass for the real thing. Popcorn time does not pretend to be Metflix or something in terms of branding, so what's where your analogy ends

> I enjoyed the part where they berate the other fork for "ripping off" their UI, which exists solely to facilitate piracy.

I did find this amusing. The irony is strong with this one, although they have some valid points expanded on in the Reddit post linked.

Comment from a contributor on the time4popcorn repo:

    I am also waiting for a reply. You guys just copy other
    people's work and don't even give them proper credits...
    if you decide to start coding I could put you back in.
    Not if you keep stealing though.

Question is: what license is that work released under (GPL3?) and does that license require attribution?

GPLv3. It doesn't require attribution, unless specified by the authors alongside the license. They didn't specify that requirement. Nothing on the Readme, no additional information on the License file, nothing in the code files.

> you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms […] [r]equiring preservation of […] author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it

Almost all licenses require attribution, at least at the file level.

Not the GPL. GNU & RMS used to complain about the attribution requirement of the original BSD licences.

The GPL does require attribution. It was the advertising clause of the older BSD licenses (similar to the one used by OpenSSL) that was problematic for the GPL, because it imposed restrictions on activities not directly connected to the software. You absolutely cannot remove copyright notices from GPL software and claim credit for it.

> You absolutely cannot remove copyright notices from GPL software and claim credit for it.

There is nothing in the GPL that requires preserving upstream copyright notices in downstream modified versions of software, or any other form of attribution of the origin of modified versions; it does require "appropriate copyright notice", but since copyright on a derived work rests with the creator of the derivative, the modifiers copyright would appear to suffice for that for modified works. The GPL explicitly prohibits attributing modified works to the creators of the upstream work (as it requires you to include notification of your modification and a relevant date).

provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty

Removing notices can be very dangerous, and should not be done without legal advice. The default way to include GPL is to also have an absence of warranty, which is explicitly required to keep intact in modified version.

Removing notices can be a crime subject to a fine: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506#d

> which exists solely to facilitate piracy.

Let's not use the words the big majors wants people to use. The right wording is copyright infringement and that's it.

If you are a plaintiff writing a complaint, an interested party writing an amicus brief, a legal scholar writing a law review article, and so on, then indeed the right wording is copyright infringement and arguably "that's it".

If you are speaking outside of a formal legal context, than it most certainly is not the case that "that's it". In ordinary English, we overload and generalize many criminal terms, such as "piracy", "theft", and "stealing" to apply to things that do not meet the precise legal definition of those words.

For example, consider "steal" and its variants. Here are some common examples of usage that are not literally the crime of stealing. Many are not even crimes or torts.

• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.

• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.

• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.

• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".

• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.

• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.

I could go on [1].

[1] I believe I once posted a longer list, but HN crashed shortly afterward and had to be restored from backup. My post was lost.

He's making a point to raise awareness of a propaganda term that's made it into the common lexicon, and saying its use should be discontinued when discussing copyright infringement. He's expressing a prescriptive statement, and you're replying with a descriptive statement.

Piracy is a well known synonym for copyright infringement. I would agree with you that something like "theft" would not be a good term to use, but Piracy is spot-on.

"Piracy" is a term used specifically to attach the implication of theft to copyright infringement, because actual pirates steal things.

The root of calling it "piracy" is no better than calling it "theft", even if it has become common to refer to it as such.

It's completely reasonable to make an appeal to talk about it accurately.

Piracy still exists and kills people. Using that word for downloading a movie just seems wrong.

And people who do copyright infringment have adopted the label. Just look at the Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay.

Nope, Piracy can be used to mean a lot of things, including stealing physical goods IRL. It's certainly not the right expression to use if you ONLY mean copyright infringement.

I once, in a previous incarnation as a naughty law-breaking youngster, frequented a torrent tracker that specialised in games. You should have seen the vitriol thrown around if someone dare copy someone else's copy/keygen/what-ever without giving appropriate credit... I was thrown off the site for pointing out how amusing the hypocrisy was.

Maybe you were thrown off because you failed to see the difference between simply copying copyrighted content without permission (filesharing), and copying something and claiming that you in fact created it yourself, explicitly (I made this!) or implicitly, by not attributing the original author (plagiarism).

There is no difference.

The content producer worked on the content and wants what they want in exchange for it (indirectly for the effort): money.

The ripper worked on ripping the content and wants what they want for it (indirectly for the effort): recognition.

One of the usual complains was their "internal rips" being posted elsewhere even when posted without any attribution being removed (or at least with no claim of creator-ship added). There were "rippers" who tried to take credit for the efforts of others, but re-distributing outside the group was the main complaint (either with "correct" attribution or with no attribution at all).

I was thrown off because I refused to apologise for not seeing the difference between one person taking the attitude "great, I'll take this and do what-ever I want to do with it under my own terms and not your's because I can and fuck you if you don't like it" and a second person also taking the attitude "great, I'll take this and do what-ever I want to do with it under my own terms and not your's because I can and fuck you if you don't like it".

There is a difference. When movies are copied, nobody takes the credits out and adds their name into them. We're talking about attribution vs. copyright. They're completely separate issues, and it trips people up every time something like this gets posted.

In both cases we are talking about taking what you want distributing it to others because you can irrespective of the views of the content creator(s) and other interested parties.

In both cases someone is saying "how dare you do what I don't want you to do?" because they believe they have the right to control such activities and the other party either disagrees with that belief or simply doesn't care.

Yeah, and if we zoom out far enough, every crime is really about people being selfish, so really, it's all the same. The point was that he's not complaining about copyright infringement, he's complaining about attribution. Moral conclusions aside, a lot of people do confuse these two concepts, and they are in fact different concepts, and it's worth distinguishing them. That's all I was saying.

  Yeah, and if we zoom out far enough, every crime is really about people being selfish

Hence the base rule of my life philosophy is "try not to be a dick"!

They made something to facilitate piracy, most probably piracy not done for profit, but did not pirate something and then put it out as their own with the intention to make a profit.

They're making an enabling technology which can solely be used for stealing. Seems like piracy to me.

It might be piracy, but it's definitively not stealing. The SCOTUS itself explained why.

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