Hollywood Strikes Back Against Illegal Streaming Kodi Add-ons (engadget.com) 77
An anonymous reader shares a report: An anti-piracy alliance supported by many major US and UK movie studios, broadcasters and content providers has dealt a blow to the third-party Kodi add-on scene after it successfully forced a number of popular piracy-linked streaming tools offline. In what appears to be a coordinated crackdown, developers including jsergio123 and The_Alpha, who are responsible for the development and hosting of add-ons like urlresolver, metahandler, Bennu, DeathStreams and Sportie, confirmed that they will no longer maintain their Kodi creations and have immediately shut them down.
VRV just added mobile downloads (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: VRV just added mobile downloads (Score:2)
CrunchyrollWith a name like that, I'd expect fake Japanese anime made by Filipinos...
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"Effort."
Pay pennies a day for a vpn. Download and install a torrent client. Set your download directory. Pick a website that offers torrent files. The end.
The most "effort" you'll have to put in will be split between renaming and organizing the files (if you're into that) or getting off your lazy ass to run to your local electronics store to buy a new hard drive or two.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
For once they're going after the exact source of the problems instead of casting a net so wide that would have put the whole Kodi team itself in trouble.
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Yep, the idiots are funding the development of free open source Kodi ad ons. I'll bet those who created them and can not use their work, will be content to release and combine the code free for everyone to use.
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So they're shutting down cable companies and the major hollywood studios that don't want to get with times? Because this sounds more like they're going after sites that try to serve content without all the bullshit... and those sound more like solutions TO the problem.
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Wrong! The content is still hosted at the server.
Re: Kodi is overated. (Score:2)
"The action will be bad news for Kodi" (Score:1)
lol, no it won't
its an opensource media center and will stay that way
it may have gained popularity because of the addons but it's not without merit without them
oh no my 24/7 rick and morty stream wont work this software a shit
Make a movie about it (Score:1)
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Call it "The Empire Strikes Back".
No! That's not true! That's impossible!
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Fuck yeah [pinimg.com]
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Alright, I'm in! But first, I'd have to subscribe to one of their lousy services...
I've been cable and satellite free for over a decade now. I've done my part.
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They are cancelling cable tv in droves. Look up the phrase "cutting the cord" (not to be confused with letting go of your mom's apron strings and moving out.)
More trouble than it's worth (Score:5, Informative)
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Is Watching Streams Legal for the Viewer? (Score:3)
Bittorrent (in this usage) is no less illegal,
How can watching a stream be illegal for the consumer? Obviously peer-to-peer "streaming" can be since the consumer is also uploading the content. If we consider purely server-client streaming, isn't it only the server that's breaking the law and not the client? Yes, technically the client does have some form of local copy for caching/buffering purposes but so do many legal media systems, e.g., HTPCs with TV tuner cards, etc., so I doubt these count as copies for the purposes of copyright law.
Imagine a m
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How can watching a stream be illegal for the consumer?
Technically it is, because of the way torrenting works: every torrent being cached during download is available for upload.
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How can watching a stream be illegal for the consumer?
This lawyer has tips on legal defenses when being sued for downloading something, and "downloading isn't illegal" is not one of them:
https://jux.law/copyright-infr... [jux.law]
Wikipedia says "To an extent, copyright law in some countries permits downloading copyright-protected content for personal, noncommercial use. Examples include Canada and European Union (EU) member states like Poland, and The Netherlands." I think if the US were one, it would have been listed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Here's an Ars Tech
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Downloading is different from streaming. There are plenty of services where it's legal to stream but not to download. Even watching digital TV over the air is the same as streaming and it's obviously perfectly legal to watch. How is watching a stream over the internet illegal if watching the same stream via radio waves is legal?
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Legally I doubt streaming is different from downloading. Do you have any references indicating it is?
Why not COMPETE with the illegal add-ons? (Score:5, Insightful)
People just want easy access to content.
If there's an easy way to get it that MPAA, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and others can actually support (and ideally offer a more reliable service with better UX and more content), then the "need" for these illegal add-ons will diminish radically. Then it's okay to pick off the bigger facilitators if they're still too big for comfort.
MLB.tv does this. I can watch it on my Kodi TV setup by logging into the account that I pay for. It's not supported by MLB, but it still works (most of the time) and MLB has no incentive to shut it down.
At some point, these content providers will realize that their content is actually worth something on its own. They'll be fine releasing free and open source software that can securely log in and stream their content to paying customers without an iota of non-free software on the client system.
Re: Why not COMPETE with the illegal add-ons? (Score:2)
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Complete discographies are still quite popular torrents. Online music stores have not got that one down yet.
Re:Why not COMPETE with the illegal add-ons? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not COMPETE with the illegal add-ons?
People just want easy access to content.
The short answer: "because FUCK YOU, that's why!"
The long answer: they are maximizing their profits and know that they could get more customers by being reasonable but if they are unreasonable they can ultimately extract more money. Therefore, all challenges to that system must be destroyed to ensure the future of maximized profits.
TL;DR: It's simple greed.
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You can male things cost $1 and people will still bitch about it and rationalize their theft.
You can make things $1, and some people will still bitch about it. We've recently been buying a lot of TV shows on DVD, because the prices are crazily low now so many people are moving to streaming services. Second-hand boxed sets are about £2-3 and even new they're about £5, so about 25p/episode, in a format that I can rip if I want to take some of it on a laptop or tablet on a train or plane. I recently bought a complete boxed set of The Sopranos for about £5. At that sort of price,
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MLB.tv does this. I can watch it on my Kodi TV setup by logging into the account that I pay for. It's not supported by MLB, but it still works (most of the time) and MLB has no incentive to shut it down.
It works *much* better for sports because people want to see the match live, before they see the result in a headline somewhere. You could store and spread the footage but it's yesterday's news. Good series and movies are worth watching years later. And you can't really sell people on the convenience features like Spotify can over managing your own MP3 collection, because it takes like two hours to watch a movie. If I have to spend half a minute to fidget with a three minute song that's inconvenient. Half a
Another Important Reminder (Score:5, Informative)
Most libraries have shelves full of Blu-Ray and DVD movies to lend.
Some libraries allow you to stream movies with your membership (in addition to ebooks and music) for free.
Check with, and donate to your local libraries. They can use the money or time.
Re: Another Important Reminder (Score:2)
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The library here sucks but there is one 60 miles from me that has a better selection than family video (which I am amazed is still open). The local library will borrow and lend books from that library (if you don't mind waiting a week to check it out) but not DVDs or Bluray.
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The library here sucks but there is one 60 miles from me that has a better selection than family video (which I am amazed is still open). The local library will borrow and lend books from that library (if you don't mind waiting a week to check it out) but not DVDs or Bluray.
If they have a website, check to see if they have services like streaming tv shows/movies or ebooks. You may be surprised...
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After posting that I did check and was surprised they do have ebooks, audiobooks, movies, and tv shows. They limit the streaming video service to ten streams a month but for a free library card I say that's not bad I'll have to get a card so I can check out what selection they have online.
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I live in a fair sized city, and 7% of the municipal budget goes straight into the libraries. We have an excellent, modern library system and they don't need charity.
What does your town waste its money on?
I haven't kept up on this... (Score:2)
Not even a temporary blimp: Elysium, & other f (Score:3, Interesting)
So for those who don't understand whats happened there was an attack on a bunch of people and completely legitimate projects here in the process of trying to kill off "infringing" add-ons (the add-ons just make it easy to search third party video hosting sites). The industry doesn't care. To them it's just collateral damage. It's like how they tried to ban VHS back in the day. No VHS no piracy was the thinking. They ignore the fact that many of these tools/hosts and projects have completely legal use cases.
https://www.tvaddons.co/. TVAddOns has a costly legal battle you can help fund for instance which is basically just a third party repository for Kodi AddOns of which most are legal (ie something like 99%).
For those who think copy"right" is a fraud and should be dispensed with as it doesn't do what it was sold to us as doing (a limited 7-yr monopoly to promote the arts and sciences for the public benefit) there are other forks of the software targeted here you can migrate to.
Some of the underlying legal tools that these add-ons rely on that were targeted will be forked by TVAddOns. While some add-ons are assisting people in infringing content this is not what TVAddOns does and TVAddOns removes upon notification such add-ons.
Covenant for instance which is the most popular plug-in for pirating shows on Kodi is a fork of a slightly older add-on that was targeted by the industry and shut down called Exodus. There are other forks of Exodus like Elysium that are readily available and can still be installed by anybody; it's a near identical replacement for Covenant (Covenant still works if you have it installed, but isn't available now because of the industries attack on it).
Misplaced (Score:4, Funny)