The film industry may have just experienced its Napster moment, complete with Popcorn.

Legal authorities are failing in their attempts to suppress a new open-source piracy technology that allows anybody to stream virtually any movie or TV show with a single click.

On March 11 a group of developers launched Popcorn Time, a YouTube style interface that streams pirated movies - from latest releases to film classics.

Popcorn Time dramatically simplifies the process of downloading movies illegally. Until now, online movie piracy has typically occurred via peer-to-peer file-sharing technology Bittorrent, which allows users to download files via an application that pulls parts of a movie from a range of different ''host computers'' to build a complete movie file.