Facebook Bans Sale of Piracy-Enabling Set-Top Boxes

Lirodon quotes a report from Variety: Facebook has joined the fight against illegal video-streaming devices. The social behemoth recently added a new category to products it prohibits users to sell under its commerce policy: Products or items that "facilitate or encourage unauthorized access to digital media." The change in Facebook's policy, previously reported by The Drum, appears primarily aimed at blocking the sale of Kodi-based devices loaded with software that allows unauthorized, free access to piracy-streaming services. Kodi is free, open-source media player software. The app has grown popular among pirates, who modify the code with third-party add-ons for illegal streaming. Even with the ban officially in place, numerous "jail-broken" Kodi-enabled devices remain listed in Facebook's Marketplace section, indicating that the company has yet to fully enforce the new ban. A Facebook rep confirmed the policy went into effect earlier this month. In addition, the company updated its advertising policy to explicitly ban ads for illegal streaming services and devices.

Comments

Better way to stop piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

If your want to stop piracy, take a reasonable approach with consumers. But that's not happening.

I have Spectrum, in an area that formerly was Time Warner Cable. TWC abused the hell out of the CCI flag, with a general policy of setting most channels to copy once whether they want it or not. In my market, they've even set channels like NASA TV, C-SPAN2, and C-SPAN3 to copy once. Even a couple of the local over the air channels are set to copy once. I called Spectrum to try to get the issue addressed and I was told that my HD Homerun Prime is the problem and the cable company does nothing to copy protect channels. It was an outright lie, and they're violating FCC rules.

This is why people turn to piracy. The DRM is completely unreasonable, and only Windows Media Center on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 can play the channels that are set to copy once. I have no intention of sharing content that I record, but the restrictions are completely absurd. Sadly, I don't even trust the FCC to do the right thing any longer, under its current leadership.

Re:Why sell these?

[donaldm]

What's the point of buying these devices? It's terribly trivial to buy an Amazon FireTV Stick and install Kodi on it. I did it to play with it as a frontend for my MythTV system, but setting it up for pirate streaming can't be any more difficult. It's not like it requires rooting the device or anything like that.

My desktop PC runs Fedora Linux with a KDE UI and it is very easy to install Kodi (it's part of the rpmfusion-free-updates repository). For those running a Debian based distro you just need to install the appropriate repository and install (google is your friend :-) here). Of course, you can always go to the Kodi website and install that way but for us Linux users a repository install is so much better since you will automatically get updates which you can install at your convenience.

Personally, I prefer VLC to Kodi although Kodi IMHO looks more polished but to each their own.

Hypocrites!

[Chuq]

What a joke, considering Facebook profits enormously from freebooted videos which are taken from YouTube (where the content creator earns the ad revenue) and rehosted on FB (where Facebook themselves gets the ad revenue). Their algorithms also prefer FB hosted over YouTube hosted video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...