The threat could be nothing more than suing for copyright violation. The fines for that are insanely high, and evidence of such is not necessarily hard to collect. After all, it's highly unlikely the devs were developing Popcorn Time without using it themselves.
They wouldn't even have to use it themselves. If I understand rightly, "contributory copyright infringement"[1] is the stick they would get beaten with here.
My hazy understanding is that if the Popcorn Time folks had wanted to get away with this, they shouldn't have said anything about Hollywood movies. They should have promoted it as a tool for watching all the great publicly-licensed documentaries and fan-made films out there on the torrent network. That would give them "substantial non-infringing use" [2]. And if somebody else published instructions on how to change the configs so you'd also get Hollywood's finest, well, that wouldn't be their fault. Oopsie!
I wonder if the way they threatened them is with such a lawsuit...unless they delete everything. But were all the devs (other than the original ones) from US? I don't think copyright fines are as huge in other places.
Either way, whoever will be working next on it, it would be preferable if he was from Spain:
Surely they download at least a bit of a movie to test. Setting up a mock service that pushes open source video might be a technical solution, but that might not matter once you're in front of a judge.
