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Piracy Canada Digital Entertainment

Canada Federal Court Restrains Sale Of 'Pirate' Boxes (torrentfreak.com) 90

Posted by msmash from the say-no-to-piracy dept.
An anonymous reader writes:The Federal Court in Canada has handed down an interlocutory injunction against distributors of Android-based set-top boxes configured for piracy. The devices, which are loaded with software including Kodi (with pirate addons) and Showbox, are now banned from sale pending a full trial.Judge Daniele Tremblay-Lamer wrote in her order: "The devices marketed, sold and programmed by the Defendants enable consumers to obtain unauthorized access to content for which the Plaintiffs own the copyright. [...] They deliberately encourage consumers and potential clients to circumvent authorized ways of accessing content -- say, by a cable subscription or by streaming content from the Plaintiffs' websites -- both in the manner in which they promote their business, and by offering tutorials in how to add and use applications which rely on illegally obtained content."
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Canada Federal Court Restrains Sale Of 'Pirate' Boxes More

Canada Federal Court Restrains Sale Of 'Pirate' Boxes

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  • Having just gotten in an S905 box today... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:06PM (#52290085)

    Honestly, I'd prefer it if they just came set up with Kodi and no add-ons. Configuring Exodus or Spectro is simple enough and most of the add-ons I do not need pre-installed.

  • I honestly see nothing wrong with this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wardrich86 ( 4092007 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:14PM (#52290135)
    The things are putting a negative slant on Android, as if it's a platform for piracy. Hell, I'd say a good chunk of people with "Android boxes" have no idea what it's even doing. I actually appreciate taking these things out of the hands of noobs.
    • I reckon the same could be said for any OS used for copying files.

      • Windows-based box would hang in a week if not infected before that.

        • I must respectfully disagree with you about the stability of Microsoft Windows.

          I think a Windows-based box would be able to remain running for at least long enough to start nagging you to upgrade to Windows 10!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by iCEBaLM ( 34905 )

      The problem is that people buy these mygica or similar android STB's and they install Kodi, a long with a lot of "free tv/movie" streaming apps, and then re-sell them as an alternative to cable TV.

      Most of these tv/movie streaming apps are just front ends for torrent downloads.

      The STB's themselves are not at issue, it's the people reselling them as torrenting streamers enabling copyright infringement.

      • It blows my mind, though, how most end-users don't even understand the most basic things about what they're doing. I'm not even sure many of them realize that what they're doing is illegal.

  • I stand with Kodi developers. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:17PM (#52290149) Homepage Journal

    As an avid Kodi user I know the developers of Kodi do not encourage piracy. They forbid the use of their name on any install that deviates from the defaults (sort of like the Firefox license) when offering a device for sale - you must fork. Plugins that make infringement easy aren't even allowed in the official repositories - all of those are in 3rd party repositories.

    Kodi is a lot like a torrent or gnutella setup. Nothing wrong with it on it's own, in fact Window Media Center is one of the best closed source comparison products to come to mind, but it's an open source project without child safety locks, just like Linux and BSD are as a whole. The fact third party sellers about the product should not be used against the developers - ever.

    • Re:I stand with Kodi developers. (Score:4, Informative)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot&worf,net> on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:37PM (#52290281)

      The Kodi developers hate those plugins, because they only work for a few months then break. And then the users come and flood the Kodi forums complaining about it.

      The Pirate Boxes are killing Kodi [kodi.tv].

      It's apparently getting so bad the Kodi dev team is considering quitting completely - they don't want to support this crap (especially since the pirate box sellers don't support them) and are forced to (i.e., Kodi is crap). So they're using legal avenues to do so - basically they've acquired a trademark so they can file trademark takedowns.

      • I love the morons there claiming the Kodi developers designed it explicity as a pirate tool. THEY'RE the tools. I used Kodi years ago when it was called XBMC. Clearly, they're noobs.

        • I switched to XBMC from MythTV. I originally had a home-built DVR with some of my own files on it, but when the world went stupid, quit supporting NTSC and didn't actually switch to QAM I gave up on messing with it. XBMC was better when you took actual live TV out of the equation.

          I am interested in a couple of legit plugins. For a while there was an Amazon video plugin that I used which was great, it worked with my paid Amazon Prime account, but it's useless now. I would like a Netflix plugin that worke

    • I use Kodi to play my music (stored on another media server and shared via DLNA) on the deck. I never even considered that it could be used to access pirated media. It's nice that it's that versatile, but it's as ridiculous to call it a pirate tool as calling your web browser a pirate tool because you can download pirated content with it.

      • In this case, the defendants in question are ones who preload their boxes with plugins that specifically access copyright infringing content sources. There are other companies in Canada unaffected by the injunction because they were smart enough to just provide the basic Kodi and such pre-installed. The problem isn't that Kodi is preinstalled, it is the addon packages they pre-install. Basically the difference between providing copies of Chrome or Firefox, or providing the same in a package that preinstalls

    • "developers of Kodi do not encourage piracy"
      I had to chuckle when I read that statement on one of their main pages. Sure, Kodi does not officially encourage piracy, but their library scrapper is designed primarily to recognise scene releases, and not much else, and is setup to work best when pointed at a torrent directories.

      • Nonsense. The scraper (that's how you write it) does not work very good with scene releases nor with torrent folders. Actually the best way to get the scraper to work is to use a very specific naming scheme.

        • Yeah, I name my stuff "Name from the Scrapper Site.year.m4v" and that works nearly all the time. Oddly it sill has some glitches with that, but rarely.

          The fact I contribute to the scrapper and the fact I buy my disk legally makes me feel rather secure about my way of doing things.

  • I'm astonished it took this long (Score:3)

    by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:23PM (#52290199) Homepage

    You can find someone selling these boxes in almost any low-rend strip mall around here, there's one up the street from me. The content is all ripped, and they sell a "service" consisting of lists of IP numbers for the latest streams. I'm surprised the networks didn't get on this ages ago. I'm not sure stopping the box sales will help, they'll have to stop sales of the content lists too.

    • Yea, I was surprised too. Here in my city there's a buy and sell group on Facebook with something like 11,000 people and there's dudes regularly selling different 'android boxes for free TV', touting how people can watch movies in theatres with the simple click of a remote. I've heard from plenty of people over the last year or so that they're cutting the cord... and replacing it with piracy.

      Despite the possibility that I may have engaged in youthful piracy myself, my blip on the radar is nothing like h

      • " I often wonder if shows like Firefly or Stargate were cancelled due to the higher likelihood of piracy."

        Not even close.

        Firefly was cancelled because the network wanted a "Joss Whedon show" because of him being popular, but they didn't want an actual Joss Whedon show. For example, they rejected the pilot and wanted something with action and whiz-bang. Joss provided them with the second episode which they then aired as the first. This dislike of the show they were paying for only intensified as the season p

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Not even close.

          Firefly was cancelled because the network wanted a "Joss Whedon show" because of him being popular, but they didn't want an actual Joss Whedon show. For example, they rejected the pilot and wanted something with action and whiz-bang. Joss provided them with the second episode which they then aired as the first. This dislike of the show they were paying for only intensified as the season progressed. By refusing to play the episodes in order they made the show confusing to any viewer. The cance

  • Wasting time, but it's OK. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:25PM (#52290223)

    While action like this is good legally, I can almost guarantee that it won't change much. I see cunning fellas sell boxes that are benign, so do not flout the order.

    What will happen is buyers being pointed to a website, from which a script to autoconfigure the box can be [freely] obtained.

    I applaud the judge nevertheless..

  • circumvent authorized ways of accessing content

    Sounds like freedom.

  • To discourage and punish widescale commercial (for profit) copyright infringement. It's an abuse of the legal system to take those same laws made to combat commercial enterprises profiting to the tune of tens of thousands or even millions of dollars, and apply them to individuals violating copyright to watch a few movies for free. The penalty in the latter case badly needs to be revised to something like 3x the cost of the movie(s).

    And why does this have a DMCA tag? The DMCA is a U.S. law, and this story is about a Canadian court decision.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by schwit1 ( 797399 )
      US prosecutors(*AA sock puppets) regard any perceived harm to a US company as breaking US law, regardless of where it occurred. They also regard all of the Internet as an extension of US territory.

  • Shocking (Score:3)

    by Not-a-Neg ( 743469 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @03:13PM (#52291001)

    I was rather shocked to see a YouTuber I had respected (Darbin Orvar) do a video shilling for one of these boxes and posting an Amazon referral link in her comment section. Considering she used to work at Facebook I figured she would be intelligent enough to realize the "free movies" including such recent films as "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" were nothing more than illegal streaming sites with an RSS feed or similar feeding the poorly designed Android app on the box. Suckers born every minute, I guess.

  • I expect that these companies will just stop installing streaming addons but make the instructions for installing the addons readily available. In fact, they already are readily available.

  • Judge Daniele Tremblay-Lamer's name makes a good pun in french: Judge Daniele "shake the sea"

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