The Motion Picture Association has obtained a High Court order requiring UK ISPs to block access to five sites that offer the popular Popcorn Time software. In addition, the Internet providers must block several more torrent and streaming sites. More
than 100 websites have been blocked in recent years and now the court has issued the first injunction against domains that offer no direct links, but only software. The order, obtained by Hollywood's Motion Picture Association (the overseas arm of
the MPAA), targets five popular Popcorn Time forks: popcorntime.io, flixtor.me, popcorn-time.se, and isoplex.isohunt.to. In his order Judge Birss notes that the Popcorm Time software has little to no legal use. Instead, he mentions that it's
mostly used to download and stream pirated movies and TV-shows: It is manifest that the Popcorn Time application is used in order to watch pirated content on the internet and indeed it is also manifest that that is its
purpose. No-one really uses Popcorn Time in order to watch lawfully available content. The point of Popcorn Time is to infringe copyright. The Popcorn Time application has no legitimate purpose.
Over the past year Popcorn Time has
become a major threat to Hollywood so it doesn't come as a complete surprise that the applications are now being targeted. Previously the movie studios took down code repositories on Github, for example.
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