MPAA shuts down Popcorn Time, including Other Major Torrent Sites

The site that provides much of the content for illegal movies shown on the "Popcorn Time" app,  PopcornTime.io, has been shut down after the Motion Picture Association of America won court orders in Canada and New Zealand.
"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," said MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd in a statement.

According to the piracy news site TorrentFreak, YTS stopped functioning in mid-October. Now the MPAA has taken credit for that and the PopcornTime.io shutdown. MPAA sued three "key Canadian operators" of PopcornTime.io on October 9 in Federal Court in Canada. PopcornTime.io was said by its operators to be the "official" PopcornTime fork. On October 16, the MPAA's member studios obtained an injunction ordering the site to shut down.
Popcorn Time has been called "BitTorrent for dummies," and it used a simple Netflix-like interface to allow watching of copyrighted content. Earlier this year, several batches of lawsuits in the US were also aimed at individual users of the service.
The MPAA statement cites comScore data as showing 1.5 million visits to PopcornTime.io in July alone. If those visitors downloaded the Popcorn Time app, they were then "able to illegally watch thousands of stolen motion pictures and television shows," the organization said.
As for YTS, that was shut down pursuant to a New Zealand court order. It was considered the home of YIFY, a "release group" that copied the movies and put them online in the first place. TorrentFreak points out that YIFY also controlled Demonii, the biggest BitTorrent tracker, and that BitTorrent download times for illegal material are likely to slow down after the latest series of MPAA-driven shutdowns.