Popcorn Time Returns Despite MPAA Shutdown

The most popular fork of Popcorn Time, which was subject to a shutdown by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), has announced its return, using the new Project Butter streaming platform. The use of Project Butter to revive Popcorn Time is ironic, since the app was developed as a ‘legal’ alternative, free of copyrighted content.

The rejuvenated Popcorn Time fork was the one associated with PopcornTime.io, which was closed in October 2015 following a lawsuit filed against the Canadian developers by the MPAA. The fall of the PopcornTime.io fork triggered a cascade which caused a number of other forks and contributors to fall away.

Last week, though, those with the Popcorn Time software still installed received a notification. Just two words: “Hail Hydra”. Soon after, Popcorn Time appeared to be working again. Now, the team behind the resurrection have officially confirmed its return in a blog post. The team responsible, who understandably wish to remain anonymous, is thought be different to the original Canadian developers who were targeted by the MPAA, but were associated with Popcorn Time in some capacity, though using the Project Butter software built by the Canadian team:

“After the “MPAA incident”, we’re a little diminished, and we’ve chosen a new direction: we’re shifting from an active development of Popcorn Time to a more or less resilience-driven development. We will keep an eye on the bug tracker (Github) and fix the most urgent ones, but you have to understand, once more, that we are a community offering an application for those without access to a real Streaming platform and a real catalog, for free, without ads

The last four months have been chaotic. We’ve seem [sic] some forks keeping up the good work and others who just wanted to attract users into a trap of adwares & malwares. We would like to take a moment to thank the Reddit Community for taking things over while we were in standby.”