Danish police have arrested two men alleged to be the operators of sites related to the open-source program Popcorn Time, which adds a user-friendly front-end to a BitTorrent client to make the whole process of finding, downloading, and viewing video torrents extremely simple. The two domains, Popcorntime.dk and Popcorn-time.dk, have now been shut down, but copies on the Wayback Machine show that both were merely information sites, and neither offered material that infringed on copyrights, nor any version of the Popcorn Time software itself. Both sites warned users about potential copyright infringement issues.

The men are accused of "distributing knowledge and guides on how to obtain illegal content online," as TorrentFreak reports, and have apparently pleaded guilty. Moreover, distributing information is considered such a serious violation of Danish copyright law that "they could face punishment under section 299b of the penal code—offenses which carry a maximum prison term of six years." That seems an extraordinarily harsh and disproportionate upper limit for merely explaining how to use a program, just because copyright is involved in some way.

A similar case has already been heard in the UK, where it was found that sites offering downloads of the Popcorn Time software contributed to the copyright infringement that results from its use. In April of this year, the English High Court ordered a number of sites to be blocked for this reason. However, in that case the sites enabled the program to be downloaded directly, whereas in Denmark, the accused simply offered basic information about how the software worked and could be used, together with links to other sites where the program could be obtained.

The fact that such a tangential involvement in copyright-infringing activities could lead to criminal charges and years in prison shows how hard the film industry is trying to stamp out the use of Popcorn Time, which is difficult to attack using conventional lawsuits because of how it is produced and made available freely. That desire was also evident in a recent case in Oregon where, unusually, end-users of the program, rather than infringing sites, were targeted. Most users of Popcorn Time are probably unaware that as soon as they begin viewing a torrent using the software, they are also making it available to others. That makes it possible to find out IP addresses, as in the Oregon case, and can land them in legal trouble—something only mentioned in passing by the now-defunct Danish sites.