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Police Arrest Five Men For Selling Kodi Boxes 'Fully Loaded' With Illegal Streaming Apps (bbc.com)
Five people have been arrested in early morning raids for selling "fully loaded Kodi boxes," which are set-top boxes modified to stream subscription football matches, television channels and films for free. The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) said it believed the suspects had made roughly $250,000 selling the devices online. BBC reports: Kodi is free software built by volunteers to bring videos, music, games and photographs together in one easy-to-use application. Some shops sell legal set-top boxes and TV sticks, often called Kodi boxes, preloaded with the software. The developers behind Kodi say their software does not contain any content of its own and is designed to play legally owned media or content "freely available" on the internet. However, the software can be modified with third-party add-ons that provide access to pirated copies of films and TV series, or free access to subscription television channels. The five arrests were made in Bolton, Bootle, Cheadle, Manchester and Rhyl.
Have they looked on ebay? craigslist? everywhere? 5 arrests is less than spit in the ocean. Those boxes are too easy to make or buy. A good android box loaded with all the "bad" addons can be had for 30 bucks. I got one that does 4K and h265 video for the same price as a raspberry pi 3.
Of course! now it all makes sense.
Or is this article really confusing?
Are they selling pirated SOFTWARE or hardware here?
And, what on earth does Kodi have to do with that? It is free (as in free to use) software that's even open source so unless Kodi is coming after them, what's the deal?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Kodi is free software built by volunteers to bring videos, music, games and photographs together in one easy-to-use application.
I mean, unless they were building and distributing these devices without offering the source code then it seems to me like there arent any real charges to be...oh...this is a witch hunt? well thats different. Lets leave it to the dunking tests to determine whether these heathens are true believers of copyright law.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So many.
I hate the entire idea of software being illegal.
I wonder if this would be illegal in the US. Code is speech, at least in the case of encryption software. Then again, the MPAA is a very powerful group. Look at their pissing content with Kim Dotcom. I have a feeling the entertainment industry would try, but (hopefully) not get very far.
Politicians paid to fight against technology they don't understand. Technically, (my understanding is) the plugins are not even illegal. It's the content they are pointing at that is technically enabling unauthorized viewing. IANAL, but I am interested in how this plays out. Could be an interesting court case, and potentially set some pretty crazy precedents. Are you watching closely?
How is this different from a browser that can go to the very same links the plugins are pointing at and get you unauthorized entertainment? Browser was paid for one way or another. By this logic, every web-browser is just as guilty, and setting grandma up with a couple of bookmarks makes me a criminal.
Kodi boxes are neat. Looks like they have finally hit critical mass.
All this does is drive the tech back into moms basement where it started. Goo Yob. Changes nothing.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I've seen one legitimate cable subscriber, perhaps inadvertently, provide cable to multiple users at apartment complexes and trailer parks through clever splices and hidden cables. Despite the risk of being charged with theft of service, sheer economic forces drive the poorest among us to alternatives when paying for content is not an option.
tl/dr: Cheating a bit to get what would otherwise be unavailable to you will not die suddenly because a handful of violators for profit got pinched.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I'm not talking about users. I speak of sellers. They are everywhere you look.
Cable companies are pretty lenient on pirates. My neighbor tapped into my cable, I found out when I bought an HDTV in 2010. When I got the new TV it had a lot of problems with tiling. I called the cable company and when they went to replace the outside cable they found it. They told him they removed it and that if he hooked back in they'd press charges. The cable dude said they never charged anyone unless they were a repeat offender. It was all a waste of time as no matter what they tried the picture was always shit. I finally got DirecTV and it's been great ever since. On analog I couldn't tell any difference.
The five arrested were all Muslims.
More like sales of $250,000, I bet they failed to factor in the cost of buying the hardware.
I think we should have police enforce patent law as well.
Patent trolls would have a field day having SWAT kick down the doors at 'Moms House of Pies" because they used 'a method to photograph a freshly made pie and distribute the picture through signage to passing traffic'
Guess I'm naïve & behind the times (I don't find time to consume the legal free material I want to watch in the UK), and they may be everywhere, but I was suprised to see one at a family member's house, bought it 'from a guy'. They were genuinely surprised when I told them that it was illegal to use (yes, I didn't expect them to be that naïve either), and that it was torrenting (therefore they were sharing material), so they might expect a notice from their ISP at the least.
It was a modded Amazon fire TV stick, extremely easy to use. As somebody who hasn't seen TAFKAXMBC for a few years it has gave a very impressive UX, and the legal apps were much better than my chromecast legal apps and (admittedly couple of years old) smart Blu-ray box. The film they put on (Nice Guys) also helped with my Spanish, due to the burnt-in subtitles, but the media companies are going to have a real problem fighting this out-of-the-box easy entrance to illegal sharing.
Um.... You do realize this was a BBC story and this happened in the UK...
Forget it, obviously not.
Similar to this Kodi box, you could also buy a piggyback chip that you soldered to your cable box main board which would descramble every channel.
This is how I know you're lying:
I finally got DirecTV and it's been great ever since.
How about we get to keepone of the three, if we promise to give up the other two.
IANAL, but if you're advertising something where the main feature is to engage in illegal activities - you're gunna get nicked. Probably on the grounds of encouraging people to break the law.
I think we all know that the software is free, and that it hasn't been "banned" in any sense.
I think the above argument is the only thing that will hold up in court.
Google doesn't encourage you to use it's browser to engage in illegal activity, any more than Wusthof encourages you to use their kitchen knives to stab people.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Are you talking about the analog days? Nothing was addressable back then. How would the cable company "zap" your box without damaging anything else connected? About the only way you could get caught is if an installer saw your illegal descrambler or actually had a tech out there with a spectrum analyzer looking for the dip in frequency for a channel they know you didn't pay for.
I owned a descrambler for a while before they went digital and it was rendered useless. Then broadband took off along with Bittorrent and nobody bothered stealing cable.
The only time what you describe happened was when DirecTV or Dish sent out a malicious packet that overwrote peoples' pirated smart cards.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What that got to do with anything? If you took the time to read through my posts you'd see where I said I bought a box to run H.265 content on that I had downloaded. I don't use it to pirate software as I only download certain things I want to see and I get those through piratebay or idope. A lot of that stuff is H.265 and it wouldn't run on the Raspberry Pi 3 I had Kodi running on. So you see, you've jumped to a wrong conclusion there Sherlock. DirecTV has a great picture but not everything is on there and I'm sure not into buying all the extra premium shit.
It is surprising one can still buy a knife, given it can be used in a crime. Forks are dangerous too, and one can hit hard with a spoon.
bullet busters blocked the trun off but most system had most of the main channels in the clear.
Trump convinced the mentally impaired it's ok to pretend they're just like everyone else
is going to get screwed eventually. Inducing law enforcement to go after people who sell readily available boxes with readily available software installed on them, is the strategy of an industry that is in denial and wilfully clueless.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Along with satellite in general, DirectTV is known for going out in bad weather.
If only people had reasons beyond "it's not really stealing" to legitimize piracy... Oh, wait! They do.
They were there way before Trump.
In 2016 I probably had a total of 30 minutes outage during particularly bad storms. Cable ran about the same and the pictures is way better than cable. If you're losing signal all the time something is wrong with the installation.
But what do they find to watch ?
I got bored with films etc two decades ago,because everything was a remake or a repeat.
Why do folk watch the same bad film time after time ?
> I'm not talking about users. I speak of sellers. They are everywhere you look.
Everywhere. And it's not even "nudge-nudge, wink-wink", they straight out tell you you can get everything for free. There's a store selling them in my little down, and the local flea market has at least two dozen stalls selling them.
Kodi is just media player software. Every TV now has a build-in media player and internet access. Okay, maybe not those 'illegal' streaming plug-ins, but they all have browsers where you can access the same content. I mean, do these built-in TV media-players really expect all those .mp4 and .mkv files they play to be "legally" obtained? They know damn well the origin of most of that content is shady at best, yet they enable it.
I think there is more behind this story and it's probably more tax than copyright related. They are making hundreds of thousands in a parallel market without paying taxes. That's the real crime here.
I expect most of us pirate content from time to time and maybe share with friends for free. When you make money from piracy though it is a crime. Be it the selling of counterfeits, downloads or devices (who's sole purpose is to pirate). This is one of the rare occasions where I am happy they got caught.
My non-computer literate nephew showed me Kodi on a Firestick, said just search youtube and you can find out how to do it. I did, it was easy.
So easy my admin (very computer illiterate) came in one Monday and started talking about all the movies she'd watched over the weekend. When asked how she said "I put Kodi on my Firestick, it was easy. Youtube walked me through it step by step."
My question is should heavy "Kodi" users have a router with VPN or add VPN to the Firestick? How paranoid should one be? Or does using VPN make it MORE likely that you will be watched?
Can we please get the location in the headline for articles that have to do with legal issues? I had to click through to the original article to find out that this was in the UK. Things like that are important to know when evaluating a news item.
I expect apart from the symbolic nature of the arrests they will have a pretty hard time actually getting any convictions.
Unlike similar things in the past, where things were sold to people to illegally access cable/satellite networks without paying fees, the boxes actually don't do a whole lot but provide hardware. They didn't write the software, nor host the access to the "illegal" content, so I am not sure what they will be convicted with. There is probably a provision about "enabling" activity, but at a certain point that would mean going after the TV makers for being able to play the content, the utilities for allowing said content to "illegaly" flow over their infrastructure, etc... There is a reason why things like Kodi boxes are "gray" market, I'd expect a lot of law would need to be interpreted and clarified before any actual convictions to take place. Perhaps this is the first salvo by the industry to try to establish precedent for future actions, though it very well could backfire on them. Though no doubt something like this will be tried in some favorable Texas court as they like to do in the weird US Judaical system.
YouTube has plenty of pirated content. How come people don't get arrested for distributing software which provides that.
Comcast doesn't do too well in bad weather either.
My satellite feed drops a comparable amount to your own. But I live in the UK and don't get to enjoy the violent thunder storms that some parts of America are blessed with, so I can believe that this becomes more an issue where the weather it's quite so moderate.
DTV quality has always been crap. For any standard of video, theirs is downgraded in order to cram more channels onto a satellite feed.
Land line cable has MUCH more bandwidth to work with. Then there's getting it straight from the horses mouth (if you can).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I think fiber to the curb may be good but copper cable sucks.
Yep. Throw out all the immigrants and hand the country back to the Clovis People and Kenniwick Man.
What - why are you looking shocked instead of packing your bags along with the grandson of an Alaskan brothel-keeper immigrant.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"