Dutch anti-piracy organisation Brein writes letters to hosting providers demanding removal of the Popcorn Time website. The last couple of weeks the application for streaming peer to peer video was forced to switch hosting three times already.
Tim Kuik, director of Brein confirms his organisation is after Popcorn Time, "we've sent letters to several Dutch hosting companies the last couple of weeks. Popcorn Time is no longer hosted in the Netherlands. They've moved to a foreign webhoster", Kuik states against Dutch technology news site Tweakers.net.
Kuik claims to work together with anti-piracy organisations in other countries to get the Popcorn Time website shut down. He also wants to try and find the people behind the application and doesn't rule out the site will be blocked.
"Therefore we have to wait for the outcome of the case on blocking The Pirate Bay", Kuik said. On the 17th of April 2015, advice of the Dutch Advocate General is expected in the Pirate Bay case.
Kuik also states that shutting down services used by Popcorn Time helps in the fight against the software. "Like when EZTV went down during the raid on the Piratebay. They come back on another location but we try to disrupt the cat and mouse game. Our goal is to make usage less attractive and make the users think about legal alternatives."
The website of Popcorn Time, which offers the application for download, suffers from downtime and slow downloads. "We've had a couple of hard weeks in which we switched between three different hosting companies", a spokesman of Popcorn Time told the Dutch Android news site Android Planet. Brein is very fast in sending letters to the new hosting companies demanding they shut down the Popcorn Time site. According to the spokesman of Popcorn Time Brein is out to "destroy the application".
"We're annoyed that we have put time in this nonsense", the administrators of the site said. However, the actions of Brein only makes the team stronger, according to the administrators. They also claim they've found a new web hosting company and that the site is no longer dependent on a single central domain server or public API.
"Today we'll release updates for Windows and Mac again, and we're going to continue", according to the spokesman. The current application is, as a matter of fact, a fork of Popcorn Time that's developed by a team that calls itself Time4Popcorn. Users can use the service to stream movies that are distributed over BitTorrent.
