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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.
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.
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.