Popcorn Time, along with YTS and other popular torrent sites that offered movie content, was closed down due to court orders from New Zealand and Canada.
The MPAA, or Motion Picture Association of America had failed to collapse several popular torrent sites such as PopcornTime.io, and YTS, accusing the developers of a number of copyright infringing violations. The America-based trade association had gotten the sanction on Oct. 16.
MPAA released an official statement via CEO and chairman Chris Dodd said in a press release, "Popcorn Time and YTS are illegal platforms that exist for one clear reason: to distribute stolen copies of the latest motion pictures and television shows without compensating the people who worked so hard to make them."
YTS and Popcorn Time operated as major divisions of the pirated content torrent network. YTS has been around since 2010 but suddenly became inaccessible in October while Popcorn Time was first launched back in 2014 and has its app currently working despite its contents not being accessible. The multi platform software has reportedly been charged as making streaming torrents as easy as Netflix.
Closing the widely used app Popcorn Time is considered one of the MPAA's major triumphs against piracy in years. According to the MPAA statement, ComScore has reported nearly 1.5 million distinct visits to the torrent site in July alone.
The association is clearly not delighted with the increasing interest in online piracy and privacy. Whether or not the United States government will help them, they will continue to try and minimize the impact of online piracy through their unwavered enforcement strategies, Torrent Freak reported.