Photo: Andreas Vas

38-year-old sentenced to probation for guide to illegal service

Sep 23, 2020 | Trials

23. September 2020

On Thursday, the court in Odense ruled against the owner of the website popcorn-time.dk, who has made money by guiding users to the illegal service Popcorn Time, and thus has also contributed to copyright infringement.

20 days on probation, dividend confiscation of 10,000 DKK and confiscation of the domain popcorn-time.dk. These were the consequences for a 38-year-old man when the city court in Odense, on Thursday, handed down a verdict in a case about complicity in the spread of illegal streaming.

From August 2014 to August 2015, the 38-year-old, on the website popcorn-time.dk, recommended and guided users to download and use the illegal streaming service Popcorn Time. Defendant have also received around 10,000 $ in advertising revenue from Google for advertising on the site.

The defendant confessed to his complicity in the proliferation of the illegal streaming service and was thus convicted of complicity in the copyright infringement that occurs through the use of Popcorn Time.

Earlier this year, a 41-year-old man was also convicted of spreading Popcorn Time, as he, on the domain popcorntime.dk, instructed to download and use the illegal service, just as he gave tips to avoid being detected by the authorities. In this case, the sentence was six months’ conditional imprisonment, conditions of 120 hours of community service and dividend confiscation of more than 500,000 DKK.

The differences in the two convictions must be found in the fact that the latter website, popcorntime.dk, was more in-depth and also guided to the use of VPN connections, in addition to the defendant also receiving a significantly larger amount for advertising. Read more about the case here.

Facts: What is popcorn time? 

Popcorn Time is a so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing service developed in Argentina back in 2014. The service primarily contains illegally copied movies and series that are shared without the copyright holder’s consent. As Popcorn Time is a decentralized service, users access the service via a downloaded program on their computer or television as opposed to a website. Every time a user has downloaded the service and starts watching a movie, the user receives parts of the movie from other users and, at the same time, the user passes on other parts oneself – thus, users are also part of an illegal file sharing network.

Rights Alliance reported Popcorn Time to SØIK already in 2015. In 2017, the service was ruled illegal in Denmark after Rights Alliance initiated a civil law blocking case. Popcorn Time was then blocked by the Danish internet providers.