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Hollywood Strikes Back Against Illegal Streaming Kodi Add-ons (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: An anti-piracy alliance supported by many major US and UK movie studios, broadcasters and content providers has dealt a blow to the third-party Kodi add-on scene after it successfully forced a number of popular piracy-linked streaming tools offline. In what appears to be a coordinated crackdown, developers including jsergio123 and The_Alpha, who are responsible for the development and hosting of add-ons like urlresolver, metahandler, Bennu, DeathStreams and Sportie, confirmed that they will no longer maintain their Kodi creations and have immediately shut them down.

2 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. VRV just added mobile downloads by rsilvergun · · Score: 2, Interesting

    it's the app I use to watch my Crunchyroll (Japanese anime streaming service) account. I'd actually been tempted to pirate stuff just so I could watch it off line. With that one little addition I can't be arsed to pirate things. I stopped pirating games years and years ago because it's just not worth the effort. I can't wait for Video to be the same.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  2. Not even a temporary blimp: Elysium, & other f by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So for those who don't understand whats happened there was an attack on a bunch of people and completely legitimate projects here in the process of trying to kill off "infringing" add-ons (the add-ons just make it easy to search third party video hosting sites). The industry doesn't care. To them it's just collateral damage. It's like how they tried to ban VHS back in the day. No VHS no piracy was the thinking. They ignore the fact that many of these tools/hosts and projects have completely legal use cases.

    https://www.tvaddons.co/. TVAddOns has a costly legal battle you can help fund for instance which is basically just a third party repository for Kodi AddOns of which most are legal (ie something like 99%).

    For those who think copy"right" is a fraud and should be dispensed with as it doesn't do what it was sold to us as doing (a limited 7-yr monopoly to promote the arts and sciences for the public benefit) there are other forks of the software targeted here you can migrate to.

    Some of the underlying legal tools that these add-ons rely on that were targeted will be forked by TVAddOns. While some add-ons are assisting people in infringing content this is not what TVAddOns does and TVAddOns removes upon notification such add-ons.

    Covenant for instance which is the most popular plug-in for pirating shows on Kodi is a fork of a slightly older add-on that was targeted by the industry and shut down called Exodus. There are other forks of Exodus like Elysium that are readily available and can still be installed by anybody; it's a near identical replacement for Covenant (Covenant still works if you have it installed, but isn't available now because of the industries attack on it).