No, that's a false alternative. The third option is to invent something that has not been invented yet-- something neither DRM nor Popcorn Time.
If I had the time to dedicate I would start with the idea that creative works are non-random pieces of unique valuable information. Then I would delve heavily into information theory, byzantine agreement, crypto currencies, and similar areas and see what I could come up with.
What about a hybrid torrent blockchain that bounties to people who register a high traffic bitstream rather than proof of work for math in a number space?
So you make your product, upload it to the Popcoin swarm, the more people who download it as a percentage of the total traffic in that class (1080p hd movies competing with other 1080p hd movies for example, rather than books. If this turns out to be infeasible some other metric for how popular a given piece of entertainment is), the more the address registered for the bitstream receives from the block reward.
Popcoins trade on an exchange for real cryptocurrencies and thus have a market value, artists that make and register content get paid. The more popular and prevalent the distribution mechanism, the more the participants get, so there's incentive to make it viral.
Not really. You kind of missed my point. There is no DRM in my iTunes music, but I paid for it. Apple takes ~30% of iTunes though, so it still stinks, but at least the artist gets something. Part of why I use iTunes is that most of the research I see shows that buying music there or through similar classes of digital music services (and movies, etc., I get those there too) sends a greater amount of revenue to the artist than Spotify and other streaming stuff. I also use Kindle, which has DRM but it's apparently fairly easy to strip off as most DRM is. DRM is kind of a red herring.
All I was saying is that creating an app that explicitly works to make piracy as easy as possible and to throw as much pirated content as possible at the user is kind of a dick move. It's doubly a dick move if they end up profiting from it. When money gets involved in piracy I think any grey area that might be there goes away. Now it really is stealing, plain and simple. It's worse than any sketchy lawyered-up studio exec.
>Apple takes ~30% of iTunes though, so it still stinks
How exactly does it stink? Apple provides a service and a platform for selling music, and they take a cut so they can continue to provide said service, which obviously isn't free to run.
And if you're unhappy with the size of the cut they're taking, it's not like you don't have options - Bandcamp (my favorite digital music store simply because they have no region locking bullshit and default lossless with a whole bunch of other format options for one price, the same which unfortunately can't be said of most legal digital outlets) only takes a 10% cut, and if you want, you could always sell directly on your website with the likes of Stripe and such (but even then you're going to be paying some fees). Of course, the last one requires the most work on the artist's part, but that's how it goes - you either pay someone else to do it for you (the cuts on iTunes, Bandcamp, etc) or you do it yourself.
Before iTunes there was Napster. Without Napster I very much doubt iTunes would ever have evolved. Maybe Popcorn Time is the first step to getting a truly decent movie application that people can purchase through?
If I had the time to dedicate I would start with the idea that creative works are non-random pieces of unique valuable information. Then I would delve heavily into information theory, byzantine agreement, crypto currencies, and similar areas and see what I could come up with.