Hollywood claims to have taken PopcornTime.io and YTS offline
The Motion Picture Association of America claims to be responsible for taking PopcornTime.io and its main source of torrents, YTS, offline. Published documents from a Canadian court seem to confirm that.
The movie studios of Paramount, Columbia, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney are named on the claim filed in a Canadian court on October 9. The charges are against three developers of PopcornTime.io and the VPN service VPN.ht. The court order, signed on October 21, states that the defendants must provide the login details of all servers and social media accounts related to PopcornTime.io to forensic experts so that they can close the service.
PopcornTime.io, Popcorn Time’s most famous fork, went offline on October 23 and has been unreachable since. Initially, the story went that there would be an internal dispute about the connection with the VPN service VPN.ht, which the team earned money from. A number of developers are said to have left the team for fear of lawsuits. It is unknown whether the developers of PopcornTime.io have complied with the court’s demand. When the website went offline, a developer reported shutting down all servers and deleting all logs.
Although YTS is not mentioned in the Canadian court documents, the film industry also claims to be responsible for taking the torrents of this release group offline. TorrentFreak writes that representatives of the film industry have also targeted the operator of YTS, also known as YIFY. The principal administrator would be a resident of New Zealand. The representatives would have threatened with a multimillion-dollar case.
MPAA boss Chris Dodd said in a statement to The Globe and Mail, among others, that the lawsuits are part of a larger comprehensive approach by the MPAA and its international partners to combat content theft. It is unclear what the exact status of the lawsuits is, but sources tell TorrentFreak that some of the suspects are cooperating to reduce their possible sentences. They may do so in exchange for information.