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Five arrests in 'fully loaded' Kodi streaming box raids

127 points by seycombi 10y ago

mulletbum 10y ago
If you can't setup your own Kodi box, I don't know how in the world you would be sold one and actually use it. It isn't simple to setup and it is more complicated to maintain (for someone who couldn't just set one up themselves).
- dec0dedab0de 10y ago
  the interface is very easy to use, from what I understand these "fully loaded" ones alreaddy have the apps installed and configured, so it would probably be easier than a roku for most people. Then they just dont do any maintenance
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    >> the interface is very easy to use If they're selling Android Kodi boxes from China (which I suspect they are, since they're widely available, preconfigured and cheap), then I would disagree. These boxes have incredibly flaky UIs. As for Kodi itself, it's fairly usable, but I would say the process of adding non-public repos for shady add-ons might be a little overcomplicated for a non-enthusiast who just wants to watch a soccer stream.
  - rconti 10y ago
    The interface is one of the worst I've ever seen. I still don't understand how and when and why "Videos" or "Movies" get indexed. You have to have the patience of a monk to attempt to add a media source with a remote control. "Let's see, does it want smb:// ? Should I include my username as part of the string?" My Kodi install on my smart TV has one purpose: To play things out of a directory on my NAS. Yet I have it added roughly 7 different ways, and have no idea how or why things get cataloged. All I know is I'm too afraid to remove any of the sources because I'm not sure which one's being used. And I'm not sure I know how to remove a source, either. I struggled with Kodi on my jailbroken AppleTV2 and it never worked right. At least it does the basic job of playing media from my NAS, so I'm happy. No waiting for Plex to decide to index my content, no fuss, no muss. Open Kodi, play files from NAS.
- mathgeek 10y ago
  If it's anything like the bandit cable box market of the 90's, buying one means you go back to the source if it needs to be repaired/updated.
- muse900 10y ago
  You'll be surprised... My uncle and auntie are using it now... they are into their 70's and don't know how to use any tech apart from a remote control. A cousin of mine, who's a dentist in his mid 40's and hmm lets say he lacks behind on technology, found a way to set it up and gave it to them. They use it and they don't even understand that its using the internet to stream pirated data... I told them that and they were like "no, he bought it for us from amazon, why they sell illegal stuff there, its free". So yes I have valid proof of 2 people that don't know how to Google - Google fully using it.
- blowski 10y ago
  A very non-technical friend of mine bought one on eBay and said it was very easy to use. Just plugged it into the TV over HDMI and it worked great. It gave access to just about every cable channel and every film and TV show. It cost £50 - his theory was that if he had to buy a new one every month, it was still cheaper and easier to use than the alternatives.
- snowwolf 10y ago
  I think that's one of the big problems the Kodi team has with these 'fully loaded' boxes [1]. People buy them and they work for a week, and then the streams break, etc. and these people have no idea how to update them so they come on the various Kodi support forums blaming Kodi for all the problems. Meanwhile the sellers have disappeared and are selling the boxes under a new name. [1] https://kodi.tv/the-piracy-box-sellers-and-youtube-promoters-are-killing-kodi/ https://kodi.tv/the-piracy-box-sellers-and-youtube-promoters...
  - thirdsun 10y ago
    And it leaves a rather bad reputation. Similar to Bittorrent. Recently an absolutely non-tech-savvy friend of mine explained to a bunch of friends how he was streaming pirated movies, TV etc. via Kodi. I was blown away that he even knew about XBMC / Kodi, the classic media center I've been using for more than a decade (though never with subpar, crappy streams). Needless to say he only knew about it since it was advertised as enabling piracy. He most certainly didn't download it from official sources and will run into problems in no time. I just wanted to say that I was very surprised to see Kodi reach mainstream awareness and it's a little sad that this was enabled via the infamous piracy spotlight.
    - dublinben 10y ago
      Don't kid yourself. The users of Kodi have always been using it to watch their own pirated media collections. They just weren't using streaming services, so there was a higher barrier to entry. Now that it truly is a one stop shop for pirated media access, it's reached the primetime.
      - thirdsun 10y ago
        > Don't kid yourself. The users of Kodi have always been using it to watch their own pirated media collections. Yes, me included. I think that's an entirely different discussion, but let me just point out that I love to buy content that I own. I do it with music all the time. Buying about 5-10 lossless digital albums is a weekly habit for me. I can't do that with movies since content creators / publishers don't allow me to buy that kind of content in a digital, DRM-free format I truly own. - It has to be DRM-free as I want to play it with my media player of choice and possibly long after the service I bought it from may or may not be around any longer. - While I don't care for the physical medium and would prefer to play the movie in Kodi, it could be Bluray if it wasn't for the long delays between theatrical release, US Bluray release and the release in my country. I don't care for localization. I require the original audio track / language. I'm not content with the delay between US Bluray and local Bluray release while the movie is already available on torrent sites. Bottom line: I'd gladly pay for movies if it was as easy and consumer friendly as buying music.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Back in the 90's everyone knew a source for pirated analog satellite decoders and if it stopped working you went back to the guy you bought it from. Isn't this just the modern version of that?
- croon 10y ago
  Having used Kodi for close to 15 years (from XBMP through XBMC), it's definitely taken some tinkering, and you still run into edge cases and occasional crashes. However the Kodi team has made an amazing job simplifying installation on numerous platforms, to the point where the most advanced thing you need to know is how to use a USB stick and 7-zip. If these people (box sellers) ship it with a remote control, and a self-contained Kodi distro (Ubuntu), I have no problem seeing anyone using it intuitively as plug & play. Maintaining is mostly an issue with your own library in my experience. If that part is outsourced to third party plugins there's not much to maintain. Though if that plugin breaks/is forked/whatever then you're boned. I really feel for the Kodi team though, getting blame for piracy, numerous support requests stemming from unaffiliated third party plugins, and all for an amazing open source product they've made for free.
- problems 10y ago
  There are vendors for these things in malls in Canada even. There are Kodi addons that make it super simple, just push a button and stream movies off file lockers kind of thing. It's pretty much dead simple and "just works" - with the exception of what happens when the services they use dies. Then you're in trouble. The quality is also often abysmal. That's why I'd rather use the Usenet setup (Sonarr/CouchPotato/Sabnzbd/Plex/Emby) and pay $10/mo to a sketchy IPTV service, I know they at least try to maintain their streams and if you hunt around you can find decent quality.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  It's a working class thing. There's a little shop near me that sells Kodi boxes. They used to build PCs when that was a thing, now they do laptop and phone repairs. £69 for the box including installation, £20 for updates. That's a bargain compared to £70/month for Sky. Most people have a geeky nephew who'll sort it out for a bit of pocket money.
bluedino 10y ago
What's different between selling one of these and selling, say a PC with Bittorrent and bookmarks to the movie section of the PirateBay pre-loaded (or whatever website people are using these days)?
- mathgeek 10y ago
  Depends on the country you're dealing with, but distributing information on how to access illegal material is sometimes just as illegal as distributing the material itself. There's also probably an element of tax evasion involved.
- onion2k 10y ago
  Intent. These people were selling a box with the specific intent to watch pirated movies. If you were to sell a PC that "just happened" to have links on it then I imagine no one would really bother with you. If you were advertising the PC as a "watch movies for free" PC then the Federation Against Copyright Theft would try to stop you.
  - ominous 10y ago
    But you do know that you can watch movies for free if you have internet and a general purpose computer, right? Why is it wrong to say that? "Warning, this knife can sever arteries.". Is this better? "Warning, this machine can access copyrighted content. Buy it at your own risk." Is this better?
    - sspiff 10y ago
      Yes, but these boxes are set up to only display media, and advertised as a way to watch copyrighted content without acquiring a subscription or license to the content. Try advertising a butchers knife as "an excellent tool to slit the throats of <insert migrant minority here> pigs", or any less extreme but still illegal activity (like advertising nails for the purpose of puncturing the tires of your annoying neighbours car).
      - 10y ago
jack-in-the-box 10y ago
IMO it is similar to pre-install a browser with bookmarks to pages listing, but not necessarily providing, such copyright infringing material. I'm not sure if this is really illegal - I guess it depends on the country you live in.
- satysin 10y ago
  It is a little more complicated than that though. A computer or web browser is general purpose. These boxes are sold specifically for copyright violation or whatever you want to call it (pirating, theft, etc). Maybe if Mozilla/Google offered a version of Firefox/Chrome that came pre-configured with links to a bunch of torrent sites and bundled in extensions to download torrents, unpack archives and play media it would be similar.
  - jack-in-the-box 10y ago
    Kodi is also a general purpose media player in the first place. There are enough websites on the Internet that would conveniently offer you such content to click and stream (no need for torrent, unpack etc.) In general Kodi does the same thing - it streams that content over your device (again no torrent, unpacking etc.) At the end the only real difference is the advertising of that box - meaning if I would somewhat distribute a firefox browser with the proper links and call it the watch any media for free browser I would be in trouble.
    - satysin 10y ago
      Yup and that is why selling a generic Kodi box is fine. Loads of places sell them without issue. The issue here is that these five people have taken a normal Kodi box, modified it and then marketed it as a device designed to violate copyright. The real issue here is how these people were advertising and selling the device. It raises interesting questions though - would they get into the same amount of trouble if they sold a generic Kodi box with instructions for the user to configure it in such a way? What if they sold it with just a link to a Google search that had such instructions? What if they provided a script you could download and it would do the configuration automatically for the user but what they sold was actually a generic (legal) Kodi box?
muse900 10y ago
Personally I think the entertainment industry is approaching the pirating issue the wrong way. They should all be looking into expanding their web tech. Serve ad's to people that want to watch your content for free, have a pay service for those that don't want ad's. On the other hand I had sky... I paid £70 a month which is A LOT compared to netflix etc, and everytime I wanted to watch something I had to be served with 3 x 1:30' ad' sessions for a 20' episode of friends... I mean why do I even pay if you going to serve me intrusive ad's. No thank you, I prefer having netflix and amazon prime that has a lot to watch and if I want something specifically that isn't available to those 2 am gonna torrent it like a boss.
- adrianN 10y ago
  I don't understand what's so hard about putting their whole film catalog online. Let me pay a buck to download any movie your studio produced in some simple format without any crapware or subscriptions or region-locking and I will do so every time instead of pirating. The marginal cost of offering a movie for downloading must be pretty close to 0. Why can't studios simply tap the opportunity of cheap hassle-free downloads?
  - martin-adams 10y ago
    I suspect they value the offering higher if it's in limited supply. Disney do this with the Disney Vault[1]. Each Disney film is available for purchase for a limited time, after which it is put "in the vault" and not made available in stores for several years until it is once again released. However, Disney may be the exception here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault
  - tajen 10y ago
    Like, I pay $5, I get the official .torrent link legally? This is pure fiction!
    - adrianN 10y ago
      Have them set up private trackers with dedicated seedboxes and add a "tip a buck for this movie" button with some a convenient payment processor. Technologically it's a weekend project for a small team and I really don't see what they lose financially.
daemin 10y ago
I know it's slightly off topic, but I can't help thinking that the Federation Against Copyright Theft should be going up against those big businesses that actually steal the copyrights themselves. So like when one studio steals the copyrights from another, or from the content creator directly.
- dublinben 10y ago
  They're not really fighting against that kind of "copyright theft." They're just an industry front group, so they'd never attack their own backers.
  - daemin 10y ago
    I know that, it is just the words that make up their acronym mean something different to me. So I find it highly amusing to have them be against copy right theft but be backed by the very people that are most likely to actually steal copyrights. Kind of like coal and oil company lobbyist using Green in the title.
TorKlingberg 10y ago
I must say the BBC article does a good job of explaining what a "fully loaded Kodi box" is, keeping it accessible without confusing things.
iDemonix 10y ago
It won't make a dent on piracy, in fact the use of Kodi will likely now increase as any press is good press. Just like electricity, people will always take the path of least resistance. If I open Netflix to watch an episode of something, and they only have half of the series/season, I'm just going to use Kodi to watch it for free. Why would I order a DVD and wait for days? Or buy it and wait hours to download it? Or setup another subscription service for a monthly cost? Why do any of this when I can be watching it within seconds, cost doesn't even factor in, it's just so easy and convenient. If Kodi/Exodus was a fully legal, licensed platform whereby I could pay monthly/per-show (at an agreeable price), I'd pay - because it's so easy to use and it has almost everything. Until that day though, I've cancelled all streaming services (as they removed my favourite shows or only offer series/seasons I don't want) apart from Prime as I like the delivery times and cloud storage. I don't even have a TV aerial anymore as that broke, I just have 3 TVs, 3 Firesticks and a Chromecast, job done.
- Ascetik 10y ago
  >Why do any of this when I can be watching it within seconds, cost doesn't even factor in, it's just so easy and convenient. Because it is stealing. Some people still believe in paying for value. Prime has a boat-load of movies and tv shows available for free or pay to watch on demand. I think their prices are a little high for 24hr rental (3.99$), but still it is legal. It is better to not go to jail than to feed one's entertainment lust.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    > Some people still believe in paying for value. But apparently not all people believe in charging for value, since a lot of shows, movies, etc. aren't available to stream. What good is half a season of something, especially if it's the second half? I've not watches shows just because there's no way to catch up to where the current Hulu/Netflix/Whatever offering was. Sometimes I'd pirate it, but sometimes I wasn't really sold enough on the premise to bother. I wonder what the marketing department would think of that. "Your attempts to sell me something failed so hard, I refused to bother stealing it."
manishsharan 10y ago
Can someone comment on what is the business model of those who set up streaming servers for Kodi etc. ? Bandwidth is expensive , why would you pay for it just to give it away for free ?
- ssharp 10y ago
  Aren't they torrents?
  - manishsharan 10y ago
    The news article mentions Premier league and other TV networks . I am guessing that these kodi boxes are being used to consume live TV content or TV shows. A day's worth of shows in high resoution could consume upwards of 4GB. Why would anyone seed that ?
    - ake1 10y ago
      i seed about that much per hour...not using the bandwidth for anything else so no reason not to.
    - aembleton 10y ago
      I guess you only need one person to do it, and then all of the consumer Kodi boxes will also be seeding.
      - rhino369 10y ago
        Does live(ish) bittorrent streaming work?
        stplsd 10y ago
        Yes, it does. Most popular bit-torrent p2p streaming solution now is Acestream. You can check it yourself. http://arenavision.in/ http://arenavision.in/ http://torrent-tv.ru/channels.php http://torrent-tv.ru/channels.php However, I doubt that 'fully loaded' Kodi boxes uses it, most likely it use simple m3u streams harvested from internets.
zelon88 10y ago
Copyright holders considering DRM to promote the purchase of their work rather than the piracy of their work should really be aware that there are a lot of people who will not consume your product if it's not free. The notion that you're protecting your work is not realistic. For many the options are to consume the product any way they can, or not consume the product. The thinking that DRM will ultimately make someone purchase something they never intended to purchase in the first place is unlikely. By having the pricing reflect this "lost" revenue (which was never lost, it was always assumed) you're only punishing the people who weren't going to pirate your product anyway. You're not punishing pirates. If you make a movie rental $1 instead of $4 you're much more likely to sell the product to interested people as well as the people who would have pirated the product if it were more expensive. Stop investing in DRM. You're wasting your time and the investment to defeat DRM will always be worthwhile to your competition.
hellbanner 10y ago
"Fact said it believed the suspects had made in the region of £250,000 selling the devices online. Kodi is free software built by volunteers to bring videos, music, games and photographs together in one easy-to-use application. Some shops sell legal set-top boxes and TV sticks, often called Kodi boxes, preloaded with the software. The developers behind Kodi say their software does not contain any content of its own and is designed to play legally owned media or content "freely available" on the internet." So is this like Popcorn time, then? Did the sellers break laws? Did the developers break laws?
- eco 10y ago
  Kodi's developers didn't, no. The way the streaming boxes work is they add a bunch of piracy streaming plugins to a Kodi installation. It's not easy for casual users to do this though. If you download Kodi today you can't just access that stuff. You need to enable access to unknown source plugins then find the plugins (and hope they aren't doing anything nefarious), download them and install them in Kodi. It's essentially the same as Android. Kodi does have a lot of plugins to access a wide variety of free content (nearly 400 video content plugins alone). You can see what is available here: http://addons.kodi.tv/ http://addons.kodi.tv/
- jwarren 10y ago
  It's an open source media centre application - used to be called XBMC. The illegal stuff are plugins for the software. I haven't used it since it was XBMC, quite a few years ago, but I imagine you could definitely plug things like Popcorn Time into it.
SN76477 10y ago
As it has been said before. Piracy is a service problem. Yes, you can rent stuff via amazon but the prices are too high. I will watch several hours of television and entertainment a night, if I did this via amazon I would end up paying well over $200 a month. If they can scale that back to something reasonable like $75 a month, I am sure that I would be more willing to pay.

127 points by seycombi 10y ago

If you can't setup your own Kodi box, I don't know how in the world you would be sold one and actually use it. It isn't simple to setup and it is more complicated to maintain (for someone who couldn't just set one up themselves).

dec0dedab0de 10y ago
the interface is very easy to use, from what I understand these "fully loaded" ones alreaddy have the apps installed and configured, so it would probably be easier than a roku for most people. Then they just dont do any maintenance
- slantyyz 10y ago
  >> the interface is very easy to use If they're selling Android Kodi boxes from China (which I suspect they are, since they're widely available, preconfigured and cheap), then I would disagree. These boxes have incredibly flaky UIs. As for Kodi itself, it's fairly usable, but I would say the process of adding non-public repos for shady add-ons might be a little overcomplicated for a non-enthusiast who just wants to watch a soccer stream.
- rconti 10y ago
  The interface is one of the worst I've ever seen. I still don't understand how and when and why "Videos" or "Movies" get indexed. You have to have the patience of a monk to attempt to add a media source with a remote control. "Let's see, does it want smb:// ? Should I include my username as part of the string?" My Kodi install on my smart TV has one purpose: To play things out of a directory on my NAS. Yet I have it added roughly 7 different ways, and have no idea how or why things get cataloged. All I know is I'm too afraid to remove any of the sources because I'm not sure which one's being used. And I'm not sure I know how to remove a source, either. I struggled with Kodi on my jailbroken AppleTV2 and it never worked right. At least it does the basic job of playing media from my NAS, so I'm happy. No waiting for Plex to decide to index my content, no fuss, no muss. Open Kodi, play files from NAS.
mathgeek 10y ago
If it's anything like the bandit cable box market of the 90's, buying one means you go back to the source if it needs to be repaired/updated.
muse900 10y ago
You'll be surprised... My uncle and auntie are using it now... they are into their 70's and don't know how to use any tech apart from a remote control. A cousin of mine, who's a dentist in his mid 40's and hmm lets say he lacks behind on technology, found a way to set it up and gave it to them. They use it and they don't even understand that its using the internet to stream pirated data... I told them that and they were like "no, he bought it for us from amazon, why they sell illegal stuff there, its free". So yes I have valid proof of 2 people that don't know how to Google - Google fully using it.
blowski 10y ago
A very non-technical friend of mine bought one on eBay and said it was very easy to use. Just plugged it into the TV over HDMI and it worked great. It gave access to just about every cable channel and every film and TV show. It cost £50 - his theory was that if he had to buy a new one every month, it was still cheaper and easier to use than the alternatives.
snowwolf 10y ago
I think that's one of the big problems the Kodi team has with these 'fully loaded' boxes [1]. People buy them and they work for a week, and then the streams break, etc. and these people have no idea how to update them so they come on the various Kodi support forums blaming Kodi for all the problems. Meanwhile the sellers have disappeared and are selling the boxes under a new name. [1] https://kodi.tv/the-piracy-box-sellers-and-youtube-promoters-are-killing-kodi/ https://kodi.tv/the-piracy-box-sellers-and-youtube-promoters...
- thirdsun 10y ago
  And it leaves a rather bad reputation. Similar to Bittorrent. Recently an absolutely non-tech-savvy friend of mine explained to a bunch of friends how he was streaming pirated movies, TV etc. via Kodi. I was blown away that he even knew about XBMC / Kodi, the classic media center I've been using for more than a decade (though never with subpar, crappy streams). Needless to say he only knew about it since it was advertised as enabling piracy. He most certainly didn't download it from official sources and will run into problems in no time. I just wanted to say that I was very surprised to see Kodi reach mainstream awareness and it's a little sad that this was enabled via the infamous piracy spotlight.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    Don't kid yourself. The users of Kodi have always been using it to watch their own pirated media collections. They just weren't using streaming services, so there was a higher barrier to entry. Now that it truly is a one stop shop for pirated media access, it's reached the primetime.
    - thirdsun 10y ago
      > Don't kid yourself. The users of Kodi have always been using it to watch their own pirated media collections. Yes, me included. I think that's an entirely different discussion, but let me just point out that I love to buy content that I own. I do it with music all the time. Buying about 5-10 lossless digital albums is a weekly habit for me. I can't do that with movies since content creators / publishers don't allow me to buy that kind of content in a digital, DRM-free format I truly own. - It has to be DRM-free as I want to play it with my media player of choice and possibly long after the service I bought it from may or may not be around any longer. - While I don't care for the physical medium and would prefer to play the movie in Kodi, it could be Bluray if it wasn't for the long delays between theatrical release, US Bluray release and the release in my country. I don't care for localization. I require the original audio track / language. I'm not content with the delay between US Bluray and local Bluray release while the movie is already available on torrent sites. Bottom line: I'd gladly pay for movies if it was as easy and consumer friendly as buying music.
kalleboo 10y ago
Back in the 90's everyone knew a source for pirated analog satellite decoders and if it stopped working you went back to the guy you bought it from. Isn't this just the modern version of that?
croon 10y ago
Having used Kodi for close to 15 years (from XBMP through XBMC), it's definitely taken some tinkering, and you still run into edge cases and occasional crashes. However the Kodi team has made an amazing job simplifying installation on numerous platforms, to the point where the most advanced thing you need to know is how to use a USB stick and 7-zip. If these people (box sellers) ship it with a remote control, and a self-contained Kodi distro (Ubuntu), I have no problem seeing anyone using it intuitively as plug & play. Maintaining is mostly an issue with your own library in my experience. If that part is outsourced to third party plugins there's not much to maintain. Though if that plugin breaks/is forked/whatever then you're boned. I really feel for the Kodi team though, getting blame for piracy, numerous support requests stemming from unaffiliated third party plugins, and all for an amazing open source product they've made for free.
problems 10y ago
There are vendors for these things in malls in Canada even. There are Kodi addons that make it super simple, just push a button and stream movies off file lockers kind of thing. It's pretty much dead simple and "just works" - with the exception of what happens when the services they use dies. Then you're in trouble. The quality is also often abysmal. That's why I'd rather use the Usenet setup (Sonarr/CouchPotato/Sabnzbd/Plex/Emby) and pay $10/mo to a sketchy IPTV service, I know they at least try to maintain their streams and if you hunt around you can find decent quality.
jdietrich 10y ago
It's a working class thing. There's a little shop near me that sells Kodi boxes. They used to build PCs when that was a thing, now they do laptop and phone repairs. £69 for the box including installation, £20 for updates. That's a bargain compared to £70/month for Sky. Most people have a geeky nephew who'll sort it out for a bit of pocket money.

bluedino 10y ago

What's different between selling one of these and selling, say a PC with Bittorrent and bookmarks to the movie section of the PirateBay pre-loaded (or whatever website people are using these days)?

mathgeek 10y ago
Depends on the country you're dealing with, but distributing information on how to access illegal material is sometimes just as illegal as distributing the material itself. There's also probably an element of tax evasion involved.
onion2k 10y ago
Intent. These people were selling a box with the specific intent to watch pirated movies. If you were to sell a PC that "just happened" to have links on it then I imagine no one would really bother with you. If you were advertising the PC as a "watch movies for free" PC then the Federation Against Copyright Theft would try to stop you.
- ominous 10y ago
  But you do know that you can watch movies for free if you have internet and a general purpose computer, right? Why is it wrong to say that? "Warning, this knife can sever arteries.". Is this better? "Warning, this machine can access copyrighted content. Buy it at your own risk." Is this better?
  - sspiff 10y ago
    Yes, but these boxes are set up to only display media, and advertised as a way to watch copyrighted content without acquiring a subscription or license to the content. Try advertising a butchers knife as "an excellent tool to slit the throats of <insert migrant minority here> pigs", or any less extreme but still illegal activity (like advertising nails for the purpose of puncturing the tires of your annoying neighbours car).
    - 10y ago

jack-in-the-box 10y ago

IMO it is similar to pre-install a browser with bookmarks to pages listing, but not necessarily providing, such copyright infringing material. I'm not sure if this is really illegal - I guess it depends on the country you live in.

satysin 10y ago
It is a little more complicated than that though. A computer or web browser is general purpose. These boxes are sold specifically for copyright violation or whatever you want to call it (pirating, theft, etc). Maybe if Mozilla/Google offered a version of Firefox/Chrome that came pre-configured with links to a bunch of torrent sites and bundled in extensions to download torrents, unpack archives and play media it would be similar.
- jack-in-the-box 10y ago
  Kodi is also a general purpose media player in the first place. There are enough websites on the Internet that would conveniently offer you such content to click and stream (no need for torrent, unpack etc.) In general Kodi does the same thing - it streams that content over your device (again no torrent, unpacking etc.) At the end the only real difference is the advertising of that box - meaning if I would somewhat distribute a firefox browser with the proper links and call it the watch any media for free browser I would be in trouble.
  - satysin 10y ago
    Yup and that is why selling a generic Kodi box is fine. Loads of places sell them without issue. The issue here is that these five people have taken a normal Kodi box, modified it and then marketed it as a device designed to violate copyright. The real issue here is how these people were advertising and selling the device. It raises interesting questions though - would they get into the same amount of trouble if they sold a generic Kodi box with instructions for the user to configure it in such a way? What if they sold it with just a link to a Google search that had such instructions? What if they provided a script you could download and it would do the configuration automatically for the user but what they sold was actually a generic (legal) Kodi box?

muse900 10y ago

Personally I think the entertainment industry is approaching the pirating issue the wrong way. They should all be looking into expanding their web tech. Serve ad's to people that want to watch your content for free, have a pay service for those that don't want ad's. On the other hand I had sky... I paid £70 a month which is A LOT compared to netflix etc, and everytime I wanted to watch something I had to be served with 3 x 1:30' ad' sessions for a 20' episode of friends... I mean why do I even pay if you going to serve me intrusive ad's. No thank you, I prefer having netflix and amazon prime that has a lot to watch and if I want something specifically that isn't available to those 2 am gonna torrent it like a boss.

adrianN 10y ago
I don't understand what's so hard about putting their whole film catalog online. Let me pay a buck to download any movie your studio produced in some simple format without any crapware or subscriptions or region-locking and I will do so every time instead of pirating. The marginal cost of offering a movie for downloading must be pretty close to 0. Why can't studios simply tap the opportunity of cheap hassle-free downloads?
- martin-adams 10y ago
  I suspect they value the offering higher if it's in limited supply. Disney do this with the Disney Vault[1]. Each Disney film is available for purchase for a limited time, after which it is put "in the vault" and not made available in stores for several years until it is once again released. However, Disney may be the exception here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault
- tajen 10y ago
  Like, I pay $5, I get the official .torrent link legally? This is pure fiction!
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Have them set up private trackers with dedicated seedboxes and add a "tip a buck for this movie" button with some a convenient payment processor. Technologically it's a weekend project for a small team and I really don't see what they lose financially.

daemin 10y ago

I know it's slightly off topic, but I can't help thinking that the Federation Against Copyright Theft should be going up against those big businesses that actually steal the copyrights themselves. So like when one studio steals the copyrights from another, or from the content creator directly.

dublinben 10y ago
They're not really fighting against that kind of "copyright theft." They're just an industry front group, so they'd never attack their own backers.
- daemin 10y ago
  I know that, it is just the words that make up their acronym mean something different to me. So I find it highly amusing to have them be against copy right theft but be backed by the very people that are most likely to actually steal copyrights. Kind of like coal and oil company lobbyist using Green in the title.

TorKlingberg 10y ago

I must say the BBC article does a good job of explaining what a "fully loaded Kodi box" is, keeping it accessible without confusing things.

iDemonix 10y ago

It won't make a dent on piracy, in fact the use of Kodi will likely now increase as any press is good press. Just like electricity, people will always take the path of least resistance. If I open Netflix to watch an episode of something, and they only have half of the series/season, I'm just going to use Kodi to watch it for free. Why would I order a DVD and wait for days? Or buy it and wait hours to download it? Or setup another subscription service for a monthly cost? Why do any of this when I can be watching it within seconds, cost doesn't even factor in, it's just so easy and convenient. If Kodi/Exodus was a fully legal, licensed platform whereby I could pay monthly/per-show (at an agreeable price), I'd pay - because it's so easy to use and it has almost everything. Until that day though, I've cancelled all streaming services (as they removed my favourite shows or only offer series/seasons I don't want) apart from Prime as I like the delivery times and cloud storage. I don't even have a TV aerial anymore as that broke, I just have 3 TVs, 3 Firesticks and a Chromecast, job done.

Ascetik 10y ago
>Why do any of this when I can be watching it within seconds, cost doesn't even factor in, it's just so easy and convenient. Because it is stealing. Some people still believe in paying for value. Prime has a boat-load of movies and tv shows available for free or pay to watch on demand. I think their prices are a little high for 24hr rental (3.99$), but still it is legal. It is better to not go to jail than to feed one's entertainment lust.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > Some people still believe in paying for value. But apparently not all people believe in charging for value, since a lot of shows, movies, etc. aren't available to stream. What good is half a season of something, especially if it's the second half? I've not watches shows just because there's no way to catch up to where the current Hulu/Netflix/Whatever offering was. Sometimes I'd pirate it, but sometimes I wasn't really sold enough on the premise to bother. I wonder what the marketing department would think of that. "Your attempts to sell me something failed so hard, I refused to bother stealing it."

manishsharan 10y ago

Can someone comment on what is the business model of those who set up streaming servers for Kodi etc. ? Bandwidth is expensive , why would you pay for it just to give it away for free ?

ssharp 10y ago
Aren't they torrents?
- manishsharan 10y ago
  The news article mentions Premier league and other TV networks . I am guessing that these kodi boxes are being used to consume live TV content or TV shows. A day's worth of shows in high resoution could consume upwards of 4GB. Why would anyone seed that ?
  - ake1 10y ago
    i seed about that much per hour...not using the bandwidth for anything else so no reason not to.
  - aembleton 10y ago
    I guess you only need one person to do it, and then all of the consumer Kodi boxes will also be seeding.
    - rhino369 10y ago
      Does live(ish) bittorrent streaming work?
      - stplsd 10y ago
        Yes, it does. Most popular bit-torrent p2p streaming solution now is Acestream. You can check it yourself. http://arenavision.in/ http://arenavision.in/ http://torrent-tv.ru/channels.php http://torrent-tv.ru/channels.php However, I doubt that 'fully loaded' Kodi boxes uses it, most likely it use simple m3u streams harvested from internets.

zelon88 10y ago

Copyright holders considering DRM to promote the purchase of their work rather than the piracy of their work should really be aware that there are a lot of people who will not consume your product if it's not free. The notion that you're protecting your work is not realistic. For many the options are to consume the product any way they can, or not consume the product. The thinking that DRM will ultimately make someone purchase something they never intended to purchase in the first place is unlikely. By having the pricing reflect this "lost" revenue (which was never lost, it was always assumed) you're only punishing the people who weren't going to pirate your product anyway. You're not punishing pirates. If you make a movie rental $1 instead of $4 you're much more likely to sell the product to interested people as well as the people who would have pirated the product if it were more expensive. Stop investing in DRM. You're wasting your time and the investment to defeat DRM will always be worthwhile to your competition.

hellbanner 10y ago

"Fact said it believed the suspects had made in the region of £250,000 selling the devices online. Kodi is free software built by volunteers to bring videos, music, games and photographs together in one easy-to-use application. Some shops sell legal set-top boxes and TV sticks, often called Kodi boxes, preloaded with the software. The developers behind Kodi say their software does not contain any content of its own and is designed to play legally owned media or content "freely available" on the internet." So is this like Popcorn time, then? Did the sellers break laws? Did the developers break laws?

eco 10y ago
Kodi's developers didn't, no. The way the streaming boxes work is they add a bunch of piracy streaming plugins to a Kodi installation. It's not easy for casual users to do this though. If you download Kodi today you can't just access that stuff. You need to enable access to unknown source plugins then find the plugins (and hope they aren't doing anything nefarious), download them and install them in Kodi. It's essentially the same as Android. Kodi does have a lot of plugins to access a wide variety of free content (nearly 400 video content plugins alone). You can see what is available here: http://addons.kodi.tv/ http://addons.kodi.tv/
jwarren 10y ago
It's an open source media centre application - used to be called XBMC. The illegal stuff are plugins for the software. I haven't used it since it was XBMC, quite a few years ago, but I imagine you could definitely plug things like Popcorn Time into it.

SN76477 10y ago

As it has been said before. Piracy is a service problem. Yes, you can rent stuff via amazon but the prices are too high. I will watch several hours of television and entertainment a night, if I did this via amazon I would end up paying well over $200 a month. If they can scale that back to something reasonable like $75 a month, I am sure that I would be more willing to pay.