This Torrenting App Is Too Good to Be Legal

For more than a decade, pirating a movie or TV show using BitTorrent, the Internet’s notorious file-sharing protocol, required a modicum of work and technical ability. You had to use a clunky program specially designed to seek out and decode pirated files, then learn to refine its search tools to find the videos you wanted. Annoying banner ads within the search program were part of the deal, as was occasional malware. Pirating wasn’t just a pain for the Hollywood studios whose products were being passed freely around the Web; it was a pain for unscrupulous seekers of free video, too.

In the past year, a program called Popcorn Time has become the kinder, gentler face of piracy online, taming BitTorrent to make it far more user-friendly and less obviously sketchy. Free incarnations for PCs, phones, and tablets look pretty much like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Instant Video, except with vastly deeper catalogs that include theatrical releases such as Oscar winner Birdman and with little to no advertising. Those benefits have raised fresh concern in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Although it’s difficult to estimate total viewership of a pirate service, in Netflix’s latest annual report to shareholders Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings and Chief Financial Officer David Wells named Popcorn Time a major worry. The sharp rise of Google searches for Popcorn Time, Hastings and Wells wrote, is “sobering.”