Last year, the music industry buried a tiny little app made by a tinkering little developer in Miami. It was called Aurous, aka the ‘Popcorn Time for Music,’ and it was destroyed before it even got out of beta.
Now, the scariest thing the music industry has seen since Napster is preparing for a comeback, with the potential to disrupt the entire piracy ecosystem. Already, the Pirate Bay is on board, with even bigger trackers potentially ahead.
The warning signs first started with a torrent-streaming solution called ‘Torrents-Time,’ which works by automatically streaming torrent links on any web page. The developers beyond Torrents-Time have already created an easy, web-based version of Popcorn Time (here), with a P2P-based streaming backend. Now, the Pirate Bay, still one of the largest torrent trackers on the planet despite dozens of attempts to rip it down, is now in the process of enabling every single video torrents with a ‘Stream It!’ link.
The beta-stage solution works like this: instead of downloading the torrent tracker and placing it into a torrent client like uTorrent to download a file, Torrents-Time starts compiling sources on the fly. Once enough pieces of the file are compiled in cache, a stream starts in a video player.
(Fun Fact: uTorrent, one of the largest BitTorrent clients in the world, was once headed by Daniel Ek, currently CEO of Spotify.)
After the file is viewed in the Torrents-Time app, the user can simply jump to something else, without having to worry about a download. That simple move could transform the Pirate Bay from the world’s most notorious torrent tracker, into the world’s biggest streaming piracy source. “For its part, TPB has transformed from the world’s second largest torrent site (KAT has that crown for now) into the world’s largest streaming portal,” torrent-focused publication Torrentfreak declared.
And what is ‘KAT,’ exactly? That refers to Kickass Torrents, recently ranked the biggest torrent tracker in the world by Torrentfreak. According to the same report, KAT is also preparing to support Torrents-Time in the near future, along with other torrent trackers like Torrentproject.se, Videomax.is and Online.porntime.ws.
My goodness, it’s just like whack-a-mole.
It’s a major problem with all of this. You can kill Grooveshark, then 10 different Grooveshark clones pop up. You destroy the Pirate Bay (sort of), and the Kickass Torrents comes up (plus a few others). Kill Aurous, and then it turns out that was just a harbinger of a brand new technology.
It’s endless, and frankly, other industries like film (including pornography) and TV are not supplying enough muscle.
It’s just like deja-vu. Ever hear of Napster, Grokster, Limewire, etc.? Same shit, different decade.
Nobody can stop this. Just give it up alread and (try to) earn the $$ somewhere else. Or introduce basic income for all.
“Just give it up alread and (try to) earn the $$ somewhere else”
And do what ? What can the film makers ( in this case) do ? Live theatrical versions of their movies ? Sell tshirts and coffee mugs ? Perfumes with the name of the movie ? Not every film is a merchandise outlet like Star Wars …
lol it’s not like they aren’t getting enough money, piracy is barely taking any money away from them.
As long as Google is paying off Congress to not let sites be blocked, not much is going to change. $$$ talks.
Copyrights were created solely to give the original content creator a brief window to earn back his investment in development costs but then to push the work into the public domain as fast as possible in order to stimulate new derivative works, pushing the creative to a new level for the betterment of all society. This bullshit system we have now with media companies fighting to extend the copyright so they can keep tapping the kitty for cash, to massive entertainment conglomerates taking grey-haired grandma’s to court, to these shady companies buying chunks of intellectual property with teams of people then looking for the most innocuous reasons to sue anybody (that’s their entire business model)…Shit has gotten so far out of line from the true intentions of the copyright act that entities like TPB, Napster, or Popcorn Time are the beacons of savior, white fucking knights, the hero’s to save the day. The RIAA, MPAA, major conglomerates like Warner …all can go to hell..They are the enemy.