But that's not what Grokster said. It was to the effect that if you promote your service for piracy then you're liable even if it does have non-infringing uses.
The result has, ironically, been quite an inconvenience for copyright holders, because it meant that the developers of piracy-enabling services merely stopped promoting them as such even though nothing about the technology was any different, which made it harder to shut them down because of the optics. If you have someone producing a mixed-use technology but actively promoting it for infringement then it's easier to convince a judge that they're the bad guys. Now that any company with lawyers doesn't do that anymore, it's a lot harder to paint that picture.
Technology-wise there isn't much in Popcorn Time that wouldn't still be there in a legitimate YouTube competitor.
And this gets double complicated when it's software rather than a service because (presumably) the liability for promoting infringement would be on the people doing the promoting, but what does that mean for the software? What happens if somebody else who isn't promoting infringement starts distributing a version of the same code? Is it different than some independent code which does exactly the same thing?
The result has, ironically, been quite an inconvenience for copyright holders, because it meant that the developers of piracy-enabling services merely stopped promoting them as such even though nothing about the technology was any different, which made it harder to shut them down because of the optics. If you have someone producing a mixed-use technology but actively promoting it for infringement then it's easier to convince a judge that they're the bad guys. Now that any company with lawyers doesn't do that anymore, it's a lot harder to paint that picture.
Technology-wise there isn't much in Popcorn Time that wouldn't still be there in a legitimate YouTube competitor.
And this gets double complicated when it's software rather than a service because (presumably) the liability for promoting infringement would be on the people doing the promoting, but what does that mean for the software? What happens if somebody else who isn't promoting infringement starts distributing a version of the same code? Is it different than some independent code which does exactly the same thing?