MPAA: We Shut Down YTS/YIFY and Popcorn Time

November 4, 2015

The major movie studios of the MPAA are behind the recent shutdown of the torrent site YTS, the associated release group YIFY, and the main Popcorn Time fork, PopcornTime.io. In an international effort spanning Canada and New Zealand, visits were carried out at the premises of at least two key suspects

The BitTorrent piracy ecosystem lost several key players in recent weeks.

The main Popcorn Time fork operating from the PopcornTime.io domain name closed its doors on October 23, citing internal issues.

Part of the trouble was started by rumors of legal pressure, which the MPAA confirmed today.

The major movie studios have sued three Popcorn Time developers in Canada, the group announced in an official statement. The MPAA obtained an injunction on October 16 ordering the shutdown of the Popcorntime.io site.

The complaint accuses the developers of various copyright infringing acts and also lists the VPN provider VPN.ht, which was operated by two of the Popcorn Time developers.

The complaint

The legal action in Canada was not an isolated incident, however. Around the same time, movie industry representatives targeted the operator of YTS/YIFY who’s a New Zealand resident.

The movie industry representatives had a warrant and threatened a multi-million dollar lawsuit, urging the operator to cooperate.

YTS went dark two weeks ago as a result of the legal trouble and is not coming back.

The status of the lawsuits in Canada and New Zealand is currently unclear, but sources told us last week that several of the accused are working on an agreement to minimize their harm, possibly in exchange for information.

The MPAA, meanwhile, is ready to declare the outcome as a clear victory.

“This coordinated legal action is part of a larger comprehensive approach being taken by the MPAA and its international affiliates to combat content theft,” MPAA boss Chris Dodd says.

“Popcorn Time and YTS are illegal platforms that exist for one clear reason: to distribute stolen copies of the latest motion picture and television shows without compensating the people who worked so hard to make them,” he adds.

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Update: The article was updated to remove some unrelated info, and add other bits and pieces that came in.

Update: The Popcorn Time injunction and claim (via HWR).

Breaking story, more info may follow later.

Source: TorrentFreak

November 4, 2015

The MPAA also won an interim injunction in a New Zealand court against the operator of YTS, which it claimed was the home of the pirating group YIFY. The torrent site came online in 2010, and according to report by TorrentFreak, the pirating group was responsible for releasing some 6,000 titles.

“This coordinated legal action is part of a larger comprehensive approach being taken by the MPAA and its international affiliates to combat content theft,” said MPAA chairman Chris Dodd.

Both PopcornTime.io and YTS stopped operating about 10 days ago.

Shutting down YIFY is a major victory for the MPAA. This is a group that uploads the original pirated material. YIFY’s pirated content was found on many distribution sites and used for a good chunk of the streams available through Popcorn Time. With this release group, YIFY, also operated a distribution site, YTS, which made the group more public facing than others, which tend to more quietly release pirated content.

Like piracy in general, Popcorn Time will not be easily shut down. The so-called Netflix for Pirates was first released in March 2014, but was quickly shut down. However, before going dark, the creators uploaded the source code to GitHub, allowing anyone to download and develop on the original code base. Since then, several groups have taken up the Popcorn Time banner and charged forward in the face of the MPAA. PopcornTime.io, the fork that was shut down, was one of the most popular versions, but others still work — at least for now. As I wrote shortly after the first version was taken down, Popcorn Time is Hollywood’s worst nightmare and it can’t be stopped.