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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.
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/
For once they're going after the exact source of the problems instead of casting a net so wide that would have put the whole Kodi team itself in trouble.
#DeleteFacebook
Call it "The Empire Strikes Back".
No! That's not true! That's impossible!
I have several options when it comes to consuming video content: I have and external antenna on my home, a Roku device with Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts, Playstation Vue for 'cable' channels, a Plex server on my network, AND a 'Kodi box'. The Kodi system is my absolute LAST choice when it comes to finding something to watch. Yeah, there are all sorts of 'pirate-like' add ons for Kodi that will allow me to search for, select, and (maybe) stream content. The selection process is cumbersome, the streams are unreliable at best, and the entire 'pirate' system is a kludge which reminds me - showing my advanced age here - of what AOL did to IRC - put a fancy GUI in front of it, call it a proprietary spec, and 'dumb down' the userbase. The guys at TPB are laughing in their beer over the crap that's been foisted on people because nobody is willing to look under the hood and recognize what's going on. Yep - I can download the same content in minutes, throw it on the Plex server, and not have to worry about lag, bad streams, changing network conditions, or whatever. Bittorrent (in this usage) is no less illegal, and it's a hell of a lot more reliable. Not to mention that fully 95% of the content I want to watch is available to stream from LEGAL sources within 24-48 hours after it's released anyway....
People just want easy access to content.
If there's an easy way to get it that MPAA, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and others can actually support (and ideally offer a more reliable service with better UX and more content), then the "need" for these illegal add-ons will diminish radically. Then it's okay to pick off the bigger facilitators if they're still too big for comfort.
MLB.tv does this. I can watch it on my Kodi TV setup by logging into the account that I pay for. It's not supported by MLB, but it still works (most of the time) and MLB has no incentive to shut it down.
At some point, these content providers will realize that their content is actually worth something on its own. They'll be fine releasing free and open source software that can securely log in and stream their content to paying customers without an iota of non-free software on the client system.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Most libraries have shelves full of Blu-Ray and DVD movies to lend.
Some libraries allow you to stream movies with your membership (in addition to ebooks and music) for free.
Check with, and donate to your local libraries. They can use the money or time.
And the Final Part "Return of the Kodi" the empire is defeated
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
They are cancelling cable tv in droves. Look up the phrase "cutting the cord" (not to be confused with letting go of your mom's apron strings and moving out.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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).
If only they spent as much effort on weeding out the sexual predators from their own ranks...
Bittorrent (in this usage) is no less illegal,
How can watching a stream be illegal for the consumer? Obviously peer-to-peer "streaming" can be since the consumer is also uploading the content. If we consider purely server-client streaming, isn't it only the server that's breaking the law and not the client? Yes, technically the client does have some form of local copy for caching/buffering purposes but so do many legal media systems, e.g., HTPCs with TV tuner cards, etc., so I doubt these count as copies for the purposes of copyright law.
Imagine a major broadcaster screwed up and transmitted content without the rights (I bet this happens sometimes). Could the rights-holder successfully sue a viewer for watching this content? If not, how is this different from illegal streaming services. Don't forget, major broadcasters often have their own watch-later streaming services which, from a technical perspective, work in exactly the same way as illegal streams.