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Facebook Piracy Software Hardware Technology

Facebook Bans Sale of Piracy-Enabling Set-Top Boxes 61

Posted by BeauHD from the times-they-are-a-changin' dept.
Lirodon quotes a report from Variety: Facebook has joined the fight against illegal video-streaming devices. The social behemoth recently added a new category to products it prohibits users to sell under its commerce policy: Products or items that "facilitate or encourage unauthorized access to digital media." The change in Facebook's policy, previously reported by The Drum, appears primarily aimed at blocking the sale of Kodi-based devices loaded with software that allows unauthorized, free access to piracy-streaming services. Kodi is free, open-source media player software. The app has grown popular among pirates, who modify the code with third-party add-ons for illegal streaming. Even with the ban officially in place, numerous "jail-broken" Kodi-enabled devices remain listed in Facebook's Marketplace section, indicating that the company has yet to fully enforce the new ban. A Facebook rep confirmed the policy went into effect earlier this month. In addition, the company updated its advertising policy to explicitly ban ads for illegal streaming services and devices.
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Facebook Bans Sale of Piracy-Enabling Set-Top Boxes More

Facebook Bans Sale of Piracy-Enabling Set-Top Boxes

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  • Better way to stop piracy (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26, 2017 @08:00PM (#54495481)

    If your want to stop piracy, take a reasonable approach with consumers. But that's not happening.

    I have Spectrum, in an area that formerly was Time Warner Cable. TWC abused the hell out of the CCI flag, with a general policy of setting most channels to copy once whether they want it or not. In my market, they've even set channels like NASA TV, C-SPAN2, and C-SPAN3 to copy once. Even a couple of the local over the air channels are set to copy once. I called Spectrum to try to get the issue addressed and I was told that my HD Homerun Prime is the problem and the cable company does nothing to copy protect channels. It was an outright lie, and they're violating FCC rules.

    This is why people turn to piracy. The DRM is completely unreasonable, and only Windows Media Center on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 can play the channels that are set to copy once. I have no intention of sharing content that I record, but the restrictions are completely absurd. Sadly, I don't even trust the FCC to do the right thing any longer, under its current leadership.

    • Re:Better way to stop piracy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by crow ( 16139 ) on Friday May 26, 2017 @08:13PM (#54495533) Homepage Journal

      Even though you don't trust the FCC, file an FCC complaint. That will get the attention of the cable company in a way that you otherwise can't get as an individual.

    • Sucks if you can't even "pirate" C-SPAN...

      And yes, unreasonable restrictions are exactly why people turn to piracy. Piracy is pretty widespread here, and the perpetrators often have subscriptions to Amazon, Netflix and/or HBO as well as a cable package; they pirate because of convenience or lack of access, not because they want to save a buck. And nobody thinks it terribly unethical either. As some else on /. said a while back: pirates are just unserved customers.
      • Exactly. We have the most basic of cable subs with like 20-some channels and the HBOs, SlingTV (orange+blue), Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus. There are still a few cases, where I had fell behind and torrented a show, that falls under one of those subscriptions. Neither AMC nor FX(X) will let me use my SlingTV credentials to activate their respective apps, which have a lot more episodes on demand than SlingTV offers. #goodfaithcopyrightinfringement

  • Dear Pandora (Score:3)

    by Zemran ( 3101 ) on Friday May 26, 2017 @08:11PM (#54495523) Homepage Journal
    Please put your stuff back in your box.

  • What's the point of buying these devices? It's terribly trivial to buy an Amazon FireTV Stick and install Kodi on it. I did it to play with it as a frontend for my MythTV system, but setting it up for pirate streaming can't be any more difficult. It's not like it requires rooting the device or anything like that.

    • out of the box. Stuff like Popcorn Time where it's not just easy but has a good enough UI you might mistake it for legit content. And if you're in your 50s and paying $80/mo for internet it might not occur to you that you don't have the right to download anything you see. Hell, if you know what it costs to provide internet ($9/mo last I heard from Comcast's SEC filing) you might not care...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I would believe the Kodi devs are the ones behind it, because the piracy box sellers are the main issue. As they have stated, these boxes cause nothing but problems for the developers - when the plugins stop working (as they promptly do), the customers then flood the Kodi forums with angry posts about their boxes that stop working.

        Of course, the Kodi devs have nothing to do with it, other than banning all the posts But you can imagine the developers are highly annoyed by this behavior when they have nothin

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by donaldm ( 919619 )

      What's the point of buying these devices? It's terribly trivial to buy an Amazon FireTV Stick and install Kodi on it. I did it to play with it as a frontend for my MythTV system, but setting it up for pirate streaming can't be any more difficult. It's not like it requires rooting the device or anything like that.

      My desktop PC runs Fedora Linux with a KDE UI and it is very easy to install Kodi (it's part of the rpmfusion-free-updates repository). For those running a Debian based distro you just need to install the appropriate repository and install (google is your friend :-) here). Of course, you can always go to the Kodi website [kodi.tv] and install that way but for us Linux users a repository install is so much better since you will automatically get updates which you can install at your convenience.

      Personally, I prefe

  • Wait... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26, 2017 @08:24PM (#54495571)

    There's a facebook marketplace?

    • That surprised me, too. I never log onto Facebook so maybe I just missed it.

      Or maybe I'm not missing anything. I think I'll go with that theory.

  • Combat piracy with better licensing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Friday May 26, 2017 @08:30PM (#54495591) Homepage Journal

    One thing that would really help cut down on piracy is better licensing for streaming. What if we had mandatory licensing for streaming just like we do for music for radio stations? Then suddenly instead of having to subscribe to half a dozen services and then still not having access to everything, you could subscribe to one and really have everything.

    There are a number of ways this could work.

    One model that I have in mind is to go back to the original NetFlix model where they buy physical media. Let them stream to one customer per disc that they own per day. Or even every three days (to simulate mailing the disc back and forth). Of course, instead of physically buying the discs, they would buy a license (same as buying a digital copy today), but the end result is the same--anything released for purchase would be available through streaming service subscriptions. Perhaps for new releases, you would have to reserve a stream ahead of time, but you would never have to worry about which service has what older movie or TV series.

    You still might subscribe separately for sports. This wouldn't stop companies from creating their own content and only providing it on their own network--for as long as they don't sell it outside their network.

    All that said, I'm still a cable subscriber, and I use MythTV to record everything using HDHomerun Prime with a cable card. (Apart from HBO, FiOS is nice about copy restrictions.)

    • Re:Combat piracy with better licensing (Score:4, Funny)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Friday May 26, 2017 @09:01PM (#54495693) Homepage

      Want to 100% get rid of piracy, too bloody easy, get rid of copyright and you are done. Besides they already break the law with copyright as none of the content is adjudged to be of public worth and that is not about printing money, that is about the public worth of the content. As it stand most copyright is copy theft because that content has not proven it's public worth and thus failed to prove worth protecting at public expence, not juts buying that content but also paying for it's protection.

      Message to the pigopolists, fuck off, your time is done, more than enough content can be created without copyright protection so you are not needed any more, suck it the fuck up.

      • Moderated "funny" but I kind of agree. At the very least it would be good if copyright were modified to bring it in line with the purpose for which it was created: to promote the proliferation of creative works. No to protect the "rights" of the artists: the granting of a temporary monopoly to them is a means, not an end.

        So what would actually happen if we limited copyright to 15 or 20 years? If we set some hard limits on the restrictions you're allowed to attach to a distribution license? Or what if

        • So what would actually happen if we limited copyright to 15 or 20 years?

          This is the first thing that should happen. Life + 70 years is a ludicrous term. Patents, which are (potentially) useful inventions have a term of 20 years, while entertainment media is life + 70.

        • The corporations won't like it if they can't keep making money off of copyrighted works for decades and decades, especially Disney.

          My solution, which I've written about here for years when this comes up, is variable copyright terms, which copyright owners can pay for. So, if you create something, you get 5 years for free, for instance. After that, it has to be registered, and you have to pay. The next 5 years will be somewhat cheap, maybe $10k, but after that it gets progressively more expensive, like or

  • Hypocrites! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chuq ( 8564 ) on Friday May 26, 2017 @11:02PM (#54495969) Journal

    What a joke, considering Facebook profits enormously from freebooted videos which are taken from YouTube (where the content creator earns the ad revenue) and rehosted on FB (where Facebook themselves gets the ad revenue). Their algorithms also prefer FB hosted over YouTube hosted video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • millions of computers that can facilitate piracy are used by billions of people to access FB.

  • "Piracy Enabling" (Score:3)

    by TheOuterLinux ( 4778741 ) on Saturday May 27, 2017 @12:34AM (#54496179) Homepage
    So...anything that uses a keyboard? It's ok Facefarm, we will all soon be using computers that have to be connected to a Micro$oft or Google owned cloud to work and piracy or any freedom for that matter will be dead. Maybe you'll have your own mobile device one day, one that does even more than just backup all my photos, peak at my texts both on Messenger and regular text messaging, or listen to my microphone for sonic TV ad signals. I wonder what that also sounds like? Maybe block yourselves? This wouldn't happen to have anything to do with you guys having your own streaming service? Hmmmm...(tilts head sideways). All hail $uckerman for the suckered man.
  • Am I the only one that didn't know you could sell things on Facebook?

  • Too little, too late. They're hoping we'll forget their role in spreading right wing fake news in the run-up to Trump's election.

    • That must by why they never pull down all liberals death threats to conservatives... And why all those Jihad Accounts Never Get Banned...

      • What "liberal death threats to conservatives" are these?

        And would you like to play the Mountain - Molehill game...the one where conservatives pretend if they can find one single incident it counts the same as a thousand similar or worse issues on their side?

        Do you con-trolls really think you can come to this place and run your usual tailored-for-morons bullshit and get away with it?

        Fake news is a conservative invention. Its foundation was laid by Joseph Goebbels and its modern avatar was carefully nurtured

        • You Defend really hard for what should be a bullet proof position according to you... And you can go look up facebooks COLLUSION with terrorism for yourself. I'm not LMGTFY... You Talk like a punk. And Act like one too. Pathetic.

          • If you think that's "defending really hard", it's because you're a half-wit who considers any argument over five words long to be positively elitist.

            Back to your crib, punk.

            • Whatever helps you sleep better bub, Its a good thing your liberal fantasy is not my reality :-) Your weakness is showing... Better tuck that in... LoL!

  • Lets ban those pesky burglary enabling hammers.

  • The Majority of the world that doesn't buy their set top boxes from FACEBOOK, didn't care about this even a little bit... LOL!

  • Another market that goes to the Chinese. I bet Alibaba and Aliexpress are already rubbing their hands and I'd be very surprised if there weren't already vendors there that sell everything you might want to get.

    MAGA, my ass!

  • being everything can run kodi.

  • Parrots have been banned because pirates are fond of them.

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