[roblabla]

This is pretty much what Popcorn Time does right now AFAIK. The development of the client and stuff are done under the "Butter Project" (which is completely legal, distributing only works that are free of copyrights), while popcorn time merely administers servers and replace the logos.

[optionalparens]

Yup, plenty of others examples. There's also more sort of "gray" examples of things like streaming sites that just "index" the streams that are on various servers and file sharing sites like openload.

It's always a matter of how much attention you grab and what people you piss off. Things can look like they are fine, legal, and alright, until they aren't. It's hard to know if a strategy works until it doesn't.

Beyond the perception issues I mentioned, all I am saying is that the legal issues tend to be somewhat volatile because what is legally or ethically correct isn't necessarily what happens in reality. Combine that with other motivators like politicians and deep pockets and it gets pretty scary.

I am glad my spouse works in what I would call a more moral side of prosecution that's hard to argue the other way. She can't and I can't say that entirely good things happen in other areas of prosecution like piracy and digital crimes. If someone wants to cause you trouble, they can often find a "way" or at the very least dig and bother enough until they invent something or shake things up to find something. The cost of a legal battle alone sometimes is its own form of extortion and can be a deterrent. Gross behavior, but it happens.