
Sale of Kodi ‘fully-loaded’ streaming boxes faces legal test in UK - actionjack
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37474595
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IsmaOlvey
For some context, here's a blog post from the Kodi devs about "Fully Loaded"
boxes from earlier this year: [https://kodi.tv/the-piracy-box-sellers-and-
youtube-promoters...](https://kodi.tv/the-piracy-box-sellers-and-youtube-
promoters-are-killing-kodi/)

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martinald
What I don't understand is who runs the actual streams? They require loads of
bandwidth and are easy for law enforcement to target. They seem to be just
standard HLS endpoints.

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wodenokoto
The Kiss network store their videos on googlevideo.com.

Other common places to store these things are on vidlocker.

I believe the business model is that the video service provides no search,
making it hard for rights holders to be proactive, while 3rd party uploade and
curate videos under the guise of "since it was on this other network we
believed that license was taken care of (just like how YouTube tend to be
responsible for licensing and not you, when you link to YouTube)

~~~
Cyph0n
From what I read on a forum, the Kiss network rotates their videos across a
large number of Google accounts. It's quite amazing how they manage that kind
of infrastructure. What's more impressive is that when Google catches whiff of
them, which they have done multiple times now, they're usually back up in a
few days.

If any of the Kiss devs are reading this, you should commercialize your stack,
and aim it at people who want high availability personal video storage.

~~~
milankragujevic
Back when I used to host pirated videos on Google, I used Picasa. I had a
server with a GUI installed that I would download stuff onto, then drag into
Picasa and upload it. After that I'd just use a bunch of proxy servers to
request the stream from Google, and set up a redirector to send my users to
the proper endpoints. Not that hard, just very labor intensive. AFAIK there
are no automated bots / scripts that do this, just lots of people that
drag&drop videos via VNC.

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cyborgx7
>Middlesbrough trader Brian Thompson is accused of selling equipment that
"facilitated the circumvention" of copyright protection measures.

If this is all they are accusing them of, I don't see how they have a leg to
stand on. As far as I can tell they just download content that is freely
available. The circumvention of copyright protection measures happened before
that.

~~~
celticninja
He is the one making the profit though, I mean that is why he is being
targeted for prosecution, not that it is a reason to target him.

However his facebook ads were openly promoting the fact that you could access
paid for programming for free, this was his pain selling point, and I think
that is much more likely the reason he was targeted.

~~~
stevetrewick
Correct. The UK legislation which defines what kind of infringement (or
enablement thereof) constitutes a criminal offence [0] uses the language "In
the course of a business ... otherwise than in the course of a business to
such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright."

The second is a very high barrier.

[0] [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/intellectual-
prop...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/intellectual-property-
offences/intellectual-property-offences)

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oliwarner
Mixed feelings. Kodi itself is a _completely_ legal bit of software and a
great one at that but:

The videos sections of Kodi rely on you feeding it files. Yes there is free
media and there's a PVR plugin but, they're not the main pull. The unspoken
truth is people are downloading and ripping and feeding it into the app. You
can see that reflected in the regexes that parse filenames.

The legal status of plugins like BBC iPlayer and YouTube are strongly
debatable too; they're not official plugins and both services have snotty
TOSes.

DVD/BR ripping is illegal in many countries (including the UK).

So one could argue Kodi has only ever really served pirates.

Kodi could also be better at protecting their trademark. Ebay is still FULL of
people selling devices that sell Kodi as some sort of dark portal to an
unlimited cinema. They have said they're starting to work on that but without
much success in 6 months.

I think Kodi has to tread very carefully now. They're a couple of cases away
from their name being dragged through the mud. Ironically, things that used
Kodi's code (Plex, Boxee) have done much better at getting official support
from content providers. They need that now more than ever.

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elcct
What is the difference between someone loading it for you or for example a
school that teaches you skills to do it on your own?

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dspillett
The skills are general and could be applied to other tasks, the device is very
specifically being sold for an illegal task (even if the seller is being shady
about telling the buyer the legal implications).

Also Kodi itself is not illegal, so someone teaching you to install Kodi and
its plugins generally is different to someone teaching how to install (or
doing for you) Kodi and anti-anti-piracy measures.

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dmix
I recently looked into buying one of these at a smaller (little bit shady)
computer shop. The guy offered me an IPTV subscription package for $15 that
contained tons of premium channels (HBO, NBA TV, etc) which in Canada would
cost ~$60. The quality was very nice HD. The weird part was that it used some
3rd party 'emulator' app to run with a clipart icon. I wasn't sure if this was
legal. Does anyone know more about this type of TV streaming?

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pjc50
Details are a bit scarce, but this seems to be about distributing add-ins that
stream pirated content from somewhere, presumably "popcorntime" or similar?

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diggan
No, but close. Seems to be about the sale of boxes that comes preloaded with
addons that can stream and play copyrighted material.

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wodenokoto
Every media box ever has been able to play copyrighted material.

You play copyrighted material everytime you play a dvd, stream Netflix or
listen to the radio.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Indeed, all media is copyrighted by default in the United States, and this
includes any media you legally own or are legitimately licensed.

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kwhitefoot
That applies to all Berne Convention countries I think. Actually it is a
relatively recent idea in the US.

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timthorn
Poor title - it's the sale of fully loaded boxes that is being challenged, not
normal Kodi boxes.

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andybak
Looks like the mods have fixed it. The BBC article title is also OK. What was
the original title of this post?

~~~
EvilGrin
The BBC like to change the page title after the initial posting of the
article, especially if the story is still developing.

