Popcorn Time is dead. Long live Popcorn Time! The film and TV streaming app that, according Hollywood’s powerful lobbying groups, incriminates you while you use it has been crushed by regulators around the world. But like the hydra, it has the uncanny ability to sprout new heads. How? Perhaps it’s because, as one of its collective of developers suggests, Popcorn Time doesn’t exist at all.

Born in Buenos Aires in 2014, the original Popcorn Time made accessing pirated content as easy as turning on Netflix. Available for free and in 44 languages, the original app, which boasts an interface as slick as any of its industry-approved competitors, shut down the service last year because “[o]ur experiment has put us at the doors of endless debates about piracy and copyright, legal threats and the shady machinery that makes us feel in danger for doing what we love”, as the original team put it.



But the software behind the project is open-source, and it lives on. Robert English, a key member of the collective that took over from the Argentinian team, describes Popcorn Time as an open-source community project run by a bunch of dedicated nerds “all over the globe” – and that’s just the core group, not the enthusiasts who have adopted the software for similar purposes (and under similar names). “We’re not a business,” said English in a phone interview from Ontario, Canada. “We just want to make something great for everyone to use. Anybody can jump in at any time.”

Loosely affiliated groups, like the video torrent distributing organization YTS, have glommed on to Popcorn Time’s ideas – even adopting its very popular branding – and keep putting up slightly different all-the-movies-ever sites with “popcorn” somewhere in the name. It’s now less a company than a meme, and memes are hard to sue.

Earlier this month a site called Popcorn in Your Browser (“That wasn’t us,” English said, and YTS said it was them ) appeared, making use of an encrypted torrenting server called Coinado.io and the Popcorn Time logo. The site shut down a few days later – not because it had landed in legal trouble, but because users were so eager to try it out they managed to crash Coinado.io almost immediately, and the server promptly ended Popcorn in Your Browser’s free trial.



The public wants video content, and they don’t want to have to care about who is controlling distributors and streaming services. Judging by the rapid ascension of newer and better movie streaming sites the instant old ones get shut down, a significant portion of the population does not appear to be buying the film and TV industry’s assertion that watching a stream of a popular movie online is the moral equivalent of shoplifting.



Last year, Google had an average of about a million takedown requests for pirated links every day, from media companies and others. But in the whack-a-mole world of online piracy there’s always an alternative. Popcorn in Your Browser users now have Better Popcorn; it streams recent movies – Furious 7, The Avengers – in HD at a single click. For as long as it lasts.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Better Popcorn streams recent movies, like Furious 7, in HD at a single click. For as long as it lasts. Photograph: Everett/REX Shutterstock

One reason the sites stay so popular – and even if Google isn’t indexing them, alternative search sites like DuckDuckGo certainly are – is that they’re so easy to use. And they’re free.



“A lot of people ask [...] if we’re going to do advertising or subscriptions,” said English. “Nobody on the team wants it. I can’t see it happening. We’re about having a nice, clean app for everybody to use.” Convenience and ease of use are a huge part of piracy – if Netflix suddenly dropped all the episodes of your favorite show in the middle of your bender, you might subscribe to the competing service that snapped them up, or you might simply wander over to a site that has it all for free and finish the season there.



Hollywood’s heavy-hitting lobby group, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), is not amused. “The film and TV industry is comprised of hundreds of thousands of men and women working hard behind the scenes to bring the vibrant, creative stories we enjoy to the screen,” wrote MPAA spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield in a statement to the Guardian. “[C]ontent theft via sites like Popcorn Time undermine that hard work.”



A study by the Institute for Policy Innovation puts the cost of motion picture piracy at $20.5bn a year – including $837m in lost tax revenues.

Often in the US, studios can get internet service providers (ISPs) to send out scary warning notices asserting that downloading torrents is illegal. But when it comes down to individual cases, very few movie companies are willing to actually take members of the general public to court over downloads. Some have used letters of discovery to force settlements – a tactic that has gotten producers scolded in the Australian courts – but even when those suits happen, they’re more to make an example than to actually deter downloading.



English is bluntly dismissive of any suggestion that Popcorn Time is itself illegal. It’s a connection, he says, between people who want to watch movies and people who want to share them. And because of Popcorn Time’s architecture, the more people watch them, the easier they are to share. “[W]e’re not very hidden,” he said. “It’s pretty popular. There are obviously some legal things we have to watch out for and we do our best to do that, but we try to stay away from any trouble.”

