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How Kodi Took Over Piracy (wired.com)
A reader shares a report: For years, piracy persisted mainly in the realm of torrents, with sites like The Pirate Bay and Demonoid connecting internet denizens to premium content gratis. But a confluence of factors have sent torrent usage plummeting from 23 percent of all North American daily internet traffic in 2011 to under 5 percent last year. Legal crackdowns shuttered prominent torrent sites. Paid alternatives like Netflix and Hulu made it easier just to pay up. And then there were the "fully loaded" Kodi boxes -- otherwise vanilla streaming devices that come with, or make easily accessible, so-called addons that seek out unlicensed content -- that deliver pirated movies and TV shows with push-button ease. "Kodi and the plugin system and the people who made these plugins have just dumbed down the process," says Dan Deeth, spokesperson for network-equipment company Sandvine. "It's easy for anyone to use. It's kind of set it and forget it. Like the Ron Popeil turkey roaster." Kodi itself is just a media player; the majority of addons aren't piracy focused, and lots of Kodi devices without illicit software plug-ins are utterly uncontroversial. Still, that Kodi has swallowed piracy may not surprise some of you; a full six percent of North American households have a Kodi device configured to access unlicensed content, according to a recent Sandvine study. But the story of how a popular, open-source media player called XBMC became a pirate's paradise might. And with a legal crackdown looming, the Kodi ecosystem's present may matter less than its uncertain future.
It's that simple. People want to view content and issues of availability, cost, censorship, convenience figure into individual choice as to whether one uses the app and how one uses to the app.
Kodi is an extensible media player. Piracy happens in separate plugins which are neither produced nor endorsed by the Kodi developers. If Kodi took over piracy, so did the OS it runs on, because that too effectively serves as a base for the piracy plugins. Kodi is not piracy software!
Uhmm, say what?
I pretty much stay up to date on Kodi. I'm running it on hardware I re-purposed, not one of those already setup for piracy boxes from online, in fact I'm running it on an old Mac Pro.
Not a single bloated plugin doing stuff I don't want it too. Yes - I do have a plugin that matches my file names to online databases the themoviedb.org and thetvdb.com, but I can very easily not use them, I really like my scrapper info being there.
Even getting into advanced stuff with Kodi isn't necessarily out of reach. I am not a programmer and I've altered plugins I wanted to use that pulled video anonymously or with a shared account to actually put my own paid-for credentials in instead of a generic shared account. That particular program probably should have had a way to do it without editing scripts, but the fact I did and I can't claim to actually know any programming languages means something.
Kodi is one of the most configurable things I've ever come across, that's part of WHY there are so many piracy plugins for it, they're not hard to make.
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If content creators don's want people pirating their content they can make it more easily accessible.
Publishers could aid that goal by being less asshats about their content as well.
One huge problem I have with them, is they squarely and firmly label me a pirate, despite in reality not pirating and purchasing all of my media.
I do have a form of Kodi system (It's actually the older form of Kodi, still named XBMC) but I don't have and never have had any streaming add-ons
I've only ever in fact had one add-on, to allow for an http API for remote control commands, which has since been part of the base software.
My DVD collection however is ripped to my local file server to watch from any TV in my home.
For this convenience I am labeled a criminal and categorized as a pirate.
All of those DVDs were purchased legally, most all of them brand new, and even the pre-owned used ones are still in the jewel case with original disc, original paper jacketing, and with the (sometimes annoyingly placed) "used price" sticker with either a "blockbuster" or "family home video" branded price label.
But the fact I choose to store them in digital form all in the same place for my own ease of use is, despite the betamax court case being long over, still labeled a copyright violation.
It's only the coincidental fact that you would never know of my actions via monitoring my Internet usage being the only reason I have little to no risk of being sued.
Now, on top of my preferred media storage method being deemed a crime, my favorite media player interface is now being deemed an illegal device.
It's no wonder so many people have said fuck it to the game and refuse to play along.