Popcorn Time creators back away from copyrighted content with ‘Project Butter’
It began a few weeks ago with mass exodus of developers fearing lawsuits, the popular Popcorn Time fork has been pulled offline permanently. Torrent lovers have been noticing that over the past week, the popular torrent-based movie and TV streaming service Popcorn Time has been slowly disintegrating.
It began on Monday when news broke that several of the core developers had decided to leave the PopcornTime.io project, fearing a possible lawsuit. Soon after, the application’s .io domain name stopped working, a domain that was controlled by one of the departed team members. Yesterday these issues seemed to be resolved but the comeback didn’t last long.
The Popcorn Time team has just informed TorrentFreak that they have lost control again. They put in a request to transfer the domain to a new owner but their service provider Gandi.net just retracted the changes.
According to TorrentFreak, Popcorn Time developer Wally said, “I shutdown all the servers, there is nothing I can do anymore. I deleted any logs that can be harmful for any other dev.”
The decision to shut down comes after the site suffered extensive DNS attacks and tampering that made it difficult for the developers to successfully transfer the website to those who remain on the team.
Although popcorntime.io is down, the cached version of the website includes a note:
After the happy announcements of our little Butter brother, we have darker news to share. In the last few days someone has been tempering with our infrastructure, mainly our DNS service and we can’t convince our provider https://gandi.net that we are us and want to stay online. We’re doing our best to maintain the service but today we can’t give any timeline of things getting better. Please hang on, we’re working day and night to get this sorted out.
Though there are many Popcorn Time clones but this is the end of the official — and most popular — successor to the original Popcorn Time. But there are other problems afoot: popular Popcorn Time library YTS (formerly known as YIFY) has experienced global outages, and variants are still being targeted by regulatory groups like the MPAA.
The Popcorn Time project is still available on GitHub.
