THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION(EFF) is concerned about legal activity around piracy-enabled Kodi boxes and wants to know where the line is being drawn between companies that sell innocent platforms, the vagabonds that install add-ons onto them and the people who share pirated material.
“Open source smart TV software Kodi can access some infringing content streams. Now it’s in a global copyright fight.”
“The War on General-Purpose Computing Turns on the Streaming Media Box Community“. It describes how Hollywood muscle is looking to crush open source software developers and development.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Barrett / Wired:
How streaming boxes running open source Kodi media player software have made video piracy easy with third-party add-ons — THE KODI BOX pitch is hard to resist. A little black plastic square, in look not much different from a Roku or Apple TV, and similar in function as well.
The Little Black Box That Took Over Piracy
https://www.wired.com/story/kodi-box-piracy/
The Kodi box pitch is hard to resist. A little black plastic square, in look not much different from a Roku or Apple TV, and similar in function as well. This streamer, though, offers something those others never will: Free access to practically any show or movie you can dream of. No rental fees. No subscriptions. Just type in the name of a blockbuster, and start watching a high-definition stream in seconds.
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,”