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FCC Asks Amazon and eBay To Stop Selling Fake Pay TV Boxes (techcrunch.com)
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and eBay CEO Devin Wenig asking their companies to help remove the listings for fake pay TV boxes from their respective websites. From a report: These boxes often falsely bear the FCC logo, the letter informed, and are used to perpetuate "intellectual property theft and consumer fraud." With the rise in cord cutting, a number of consumers have found it's just as easy to use an app like Kodi on a cheap streaming media device to gain access to content â" like TV shows and movies -- that they would otherwise miss out on by dropping their pay TV subscription. As an added perk, various software add-ons enable consumers to stream movies still in the theaters, too. It's an easier way to access pirated content than visiting The Pirate Bay and downloading torrent files.
Like bit-torrent, the cat is out of the bag. No amount of flailing or FUD is going to make it go away. These devices are too easy to setup. Media prices and availability are convoluted and over priced, and laws so one sided that nobody respects them.
Over and over I see copyright terms extended for no good reason. Theft of the public domain for YEARS is what led directly to where we are today. FCC can maybe try to regulate the sale of preconfigured boxes, but this software runs on so many different devices, and is so easy to setup that there is really nothing they can do about it. For the most part, it's open source, and community developed, so there is no company they can sue into oblivion. No end-game.
It's funny, In my lifetime, I can remember the same flailing over VHS, Napster, TeVo, torrents, streaming, digital downloads... the list goes on and on. The tech never goes away. Sometimes there is a company to go after, sometimes they even lose, but aside from somebody losing ill-gotten profit, and a company closing its doors, the tech never goes away.
The lawyers get paid, content keeps moving, and tech slowly evolves around whatever roadblocks and DRM is put into place. Copyright is extended, more ways to pirate are developed and the cycle continues.
Even when they come up with a format or standard to stop the direct ripping and sharing of content, it ALWAYS fails. The floodgates open.
Can't stop the signal.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
you have any idea what you are talking about?
this is the legal def. of theft:
Theft, in law, a general term covering a variety of specific types of stealing, including the crimes of larceny, robbery, and burglary. Theft is defined as the physical removal of an object that is capable of being stolen without the consent of the owner and with the intention of depriving the owner of it permanently.
people llike you can push your "theft" agenda all you want. it is copyright information, not theft.
what about theft from the public domain? you know, they get a copyright, decide 70 years isnt long enough and petitiion to make it even longer?