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:Better way to stop piracy

[crow]

Even though you don't trust the FCC, file an FCC complaint. That will get the attention of the cable company in a way that you otherwise can't get as an individual.

Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a facebook marketplace?

Combat piracy with better licensing

[crow]

One thing that would really help cut down on piracy is better licensing for streaming. What if we had mandatory licensing for streaming just like we do for music for radio stations? Then suddenly instead of having to subscribe to half a dozen services and then still not having access to everything, you could subscribe to one and really have everything.

There are a number of ways this could work.

One model that I have in mind is to go back to the original NetFlix model where they buy physical media. Let them stream to one customer per disc that they own per day. Or even every three days (to simulate mailing the disc back and forth). Of course, instead of physically buying the discs, they would buy a license (same as buying a digital copy today), but the end result is the same--anything released for purchase would be available through streaming service subscriptions. Perhaps for new releases, you would have to reserve a stream ahead of time, but you would never have to worry about which service has what older movie or TV series.

You still might subscribe separately for sports. This wouldn't stop companies from creating their own content and only providing it on their own network--for as long as they don't sell it outside their network.

All that said, I'm still a cable subscriber, and I use MythTV to record everything using HDHomerun Prime with a cable card. (Apart from HBO, FiOS is nice about copy restrictions.)

Re:Combat piracy with better licensing

[rtb61]

Want to 100% get rid of piracy, too bloody easy, get rid of copyright and you are done. Besides they already break the law with copyright as none of the content is adjudged to be of public worth and that is not about printing money, that is about the public worth of the content. As it stand most copyright is copy theft because that content has not proven it's public worth and thus failed to prove worth protecting at public expence, not juts buying that content but also paying for it's protection.

Message to the pigopolists, fuck off, your time is done, more than enough content can be created without copyright protection so you are not needed any more, suck it the fuck up.

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?...