Imagine for a moment if Napster were cloned hundreds of times. If there were a NapsterStanford, a NapsterMIT, or a Napster for your high school completely independent from, yet just as powerful as, the original. Imagine what would have happened if Sean Parker had released the source code, allowing any developer to essentially copy and build upon his software. Imagine if Napster were open source.
The RIAA would have fought a war on a thousand fronts. And lost.
Video piracy is on the verge of having its Napster moment. A piece of software appeared last week called Popcorn Time. It makes watching pirated movies as easy as firing up Netflix. Everything is free. There’s no mess or fuss — you press play.
Popcorn Time makes it as easy to watch pirated content as Napster did to download songs. It’s a nightmare for Hollywood.
The creators of the original Popcorn Time stated emphatically that it’s perfectly legal to run the app because neither you nor the app “hold” the movies – the Internet holds them. Once installed, however, the program throws a warning screen forcing the user to essentially agree that it’s a bit shady.
Yet strictly speaking, piracy is as much stealing as is taking a photograph of art with the intent to reproduce it. Is it wrong? Yes. Does the practice speak to a larger issue? Absolutely.
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