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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

With those applications you can get from clean install to playing a copyrighted movie in three clicks. You don't do that with a web browser.

Also, they are meant to be used that way. When people recommend those applications to friends and relatives they are meant to be used for copyright infringement.

I'm not agreeing with what was done here, but there is a qualitative difference between a torrent client, media player, etc, and the popcorn time applications.

Edit: yes, you can hit a movie streaming service with your web browser by navigating to a URL. Have a cookie. But that requires previous external data and thus is not "clean" install.

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Right. This is the money sentence:

> Indeed, copyright infringement is so prevalent within the Projects that infringement plainly is their predominant use and purpose.

"Predominant use and purpose" is one of the tests for whether software is copyright-infringing under DMCA. IANAL but this looks pretty open-and-shut to me.

You're on the money here.

Of course "predominant use and purpose" eventually boils down to "I know it when I see it" [1]

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

Not necessarily. You could certainly have some quantifiable metric. For example, you could draw the line at, say, 80% of the works on offer.

In this case, that wouldn't be necessary. There may be a fine line somewhere where you could argue that a piece of software does or does not have infringement as its primary purpose. PopcornTime is not close to that line.

> With those applications you can get from clean install to playing a copyrighted movie in three clicks. You don't do that with a web browser.

Sure you can.

Click 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/fullmoviesonyoutube/

Click 2: Select a movie. Copyright infringement in two easy clicks!

There is no mainstream browser that automatically directs the user to a list like /r/fullmoviesonyoutube. A browser is a generic tool that can be made to visit infringing content, but does not itself encourage the user to do so. If there really were no difference between Popcorn Time and a browser, nobody would have used Popcorn Time, because 100% of its users already had browsers.

What if Popcorn Time made the user click a button 100 times before granting full access? Is that enough effort? Or if a link was proposed 2 clicks away from the homepage of a major browser? Is that too little effort? Where do we draw the line? I guess we don't, since the DMCA's scope is so large.

If the primary purpose of the app were still infringement but you had to click a button 100 times to use the app, the primary purpose of the app would still be infringement.

Where did that URL come from? That's what I meant by "clean install". You can really get from zero to copyright violation in three clicks and no external knowledge by using those applications.

How is that at all a useful distinction? Just having them change the default URL to YouTube but then having everyone learn the "pirate URL" through the same channels they learn about the existence of the software is not going to change anything.

I am going to make some software that scrapes that subreddit and presents a nice UI. Then see if it gets a DMCA takedown.

I haven't installed or used popcorn time.

I can't see how the number of clicks to install it and start watching a copyrighted movie could be less than required to install a web browser and start watching a copyrighted movie.

Surely they're both: click to download -> click to run installer -> click to start watching the movie....

Like I said, I have no experience doing that in popcorn time, but I can 100% say I could do that in a browser.

If there exists a browser which, when freshly installed, starts playing infringing content as soon as you launch it, that would probably get in trouble too. But no mainstream browser does that.

Google "[moviename] streaming". Click a link, hit play.

Bad or fake link, go back, click link, hit play, repeat until you give up.

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