Facebook Bans Sale of Piracy-Enabling Set-Top Boxes 61
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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You mean eBay? I hate eBay, but if I wanted an HDCP 2.whatever stripper or a pre-built piratestream box, it's the first place I'd look.
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I read it as Amazon because so many of the devices are FireTV Sticks. It's so brain-dead easy to install apps on them that I wonder why people pay someone else to do it.
Better way to stop piracy (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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.
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Yup, that same FCC. I filed a complaint once and it got my problem resolved.
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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
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Dear Pandora (Score:3)
Why sell these? (Score:2)
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.
They're setup with pirate streaming services (Score:2)
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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
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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
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Wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a facebook marketplace?
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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)
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)
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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I'm not sure how to feel about Facebook banning what I can and cannot sell.
I think it's talking about pages for vendors and such.
TIL that people are selling stuff on Facebook (Score:3)
Why?
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Why not is the better question.
I've sold stuff on facebook before, no marketplace required.
Hypocrites! (Score:5, Informative)
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]
Odd considering to reach FB (Score:2)
millions of computers that can facilitate piracy are used by billions of people to access FB.
"Piracy Enabling" (Score:3)
Do what now? (Score:2)
Facebook is growing a conscience? (Score:1)
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.
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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
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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.
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Coming soon (Score:2)
Lets ban those pesky burglary enabling hammers.
Meanwhile... (Score:1)
Effin' great (Score:2)
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!
so there banning everything (Score:2)
In other news (Score:1)
Parrots have been banned because pirates are fond of them.