Oregon Judge Allowed Popcorn Time to Remain Functional, Domain Closure of the Service Resulted in Norwegian Authorities Being Sued!

A judgment against a user of Popcorn Time has been signed off by a federal court in Oregon. The accused streamed a copy of The Cobbler, a famous Adam Sandler movie. Both of the parties have already decided on an everlasting injunction. The involved judge has already stripped the parts which required the defendant to get rid of all BitTorrent clients from her computer.

A P2P software ban was also removed. In United States federal courts, there are a lot of lawsuits against file-sharers. In the recent years, countless people have been accused mostly due to usage of BitTorrent clients. Recently, the focus has shifted to people using the Popcorn Time service.

During this summer, they were targeted with a range of lawsuits. Makers of The Cobbler filed a case and also listed the IP addresses of various Popcorn Time users, in the complaint. The filmmakers wish to identify the account holders and also settle the dispute outside court. From the looks of it, this may have been done already.

This is not the only case on Popcorn Time. Recently, another user had to settle with the studio. The settlement frequently ranges within a few hundred and few thousand dollars but the complete scale of arguments, remain undisclosed.

The said defendant had to stay anonymous but ultimately, she admitted that her IP address was used to download and distribute The Cobbler. Both parties decided on a consent agreement in the end and a District Court Judge further signed it off.

Meanwhile, a consumer unfriendly situation was brought to focus by the Federal Communications Commission in USA. It forces lots of cable TV viewers to access the content, offered by their providers via their devices. FCC reported that around 99% pay-TV subscribers are forced to watch content supplied at increased rates.

A rental fee of $231 is paid by an average American household. This amounts to $20 billion every year, for all consumers in the US. With the help of a new proposal from FCC, consumers can change their expensive cable set top boxes for other applications and devices.

This would result in a major impact on companies like Comcast who would start facing serious competition from content providers like Google/Alphabet.

President Barack Obama favored this plan last month but a warning was issued through an MPAA opinion. He warned that loosening the set-top box market to third party providers will give rise to piracy.

According to the MPAA warning, the FCC may not encourage substitutes by taking the content industry’s intellectual property and providing it to members of the technological industry. They will end up making it easier for pirate site operators who are hell bent on setting up a black market business through content theft.

Popcorn Time has gained a huge amount of popularity worldwide due to its ability of streaming torrent files through a Netflix-style layout. Many movie industry companies have voiced their concern regarding it. A lot of them are working hard to prevent the threat from expanding, by going after third party developers and several other branches.

Recently, a local Popcorn Time site was presented in front of the local economic crime police by the Norwegian right holders. The application itself was not hosted by the site but various news articles were posted along with links to websites which provided the application.

Professor Olay Torvund from the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law along with other legal experts spoke about their concern regarding this action. Now, Norwegian UNIX User Group and Electronic Frontier Norway has demanded the court to decide if the domain seizure was correct.