Biggest Kodi sweep: Brit cops nab five, bag some dodgy sticks

Re: Too late.

Hilarious. Search for it on Google and you get a bullet point list of how to install in the search results.

Will Google get their wrists slapped?

Sky-high prices?

"I personally think that only Sky etc dropping their prices down to around 10% of what they are now will do that.

That would mean they'd have to stop paying silly money for sports rights etc. Won't someone think of the starving Premier League footballers children?

Of course, some of us wouldn't watch Sky if it was the only provider left, and access was given away free with a copy of the soaraway Sun.

Re: This concerns me....

It all comes down to the intended use of the device I think - these devices are purposely assembled to facilitate copyright infringement. If they'd left out the Kodi plugins then they'd be completely legal but selling an out-of-the-box piracy solution isn't going to end well.

Re: This concerns me....

However selling a machine with kodi + plugins + hardware becomes illegal... why?

Aiding and abetting.

Re: This concerns me....

"However selling a machine with kodi + plugins + hardware becomes illegal... why?"

Simply because the police say it is and there in lies a problem.

The police are not qualified nor competent to make legal decisions beyond defined criminal acts.

However if some pressure group gets support from the people the police are required to listen to then you get arrests without legal grounds.

That justice in the UK is now beyond the price range of the average citizen is why everyone involved feels safe in this action. The idea is that if enough people are arrested and charged with something then joe public will believe that it is illegal, when clearly no crime has been commited.

Sadly without anyone in Government actually working for the people who put them in office and pay their wages then you are going to get this sort of abuse from minories with disproportional representation.

Effectively the police and Government are working for the movie distributors and we are paying for it.

The movie distributors make no content and are annoyed when people obtain the content via a different distributor without paying them. That they truely believe that they have a right to tax us for everything we are allowed to watch is clearly supported by our government representatives who are the ones telling the police to make groundless arrests

Re: This concerns me....

Well it like many things in the law comes down to "intent"...

If you sell a device for the purpose of doing something illegal then selling the device becomes illegal too. If you sell a device which is intended for a legal purpose and the buyer chooses to use it for an illegal purpose then that's on them and not the seller.

Take for example kitchen knives, sold for the purpose of preparing food, but perfectly capable of killing someone if used for that purpose.

Re: This concerns me....

All good questions from Ogi, none of which I have a sensible answer for.

The question that I have is: Why is Copyright Infringement a criminal matter at all? It would seem to me to be the perfect case of a civil matter, and the various copyright holders should have to sue those they deem to be infringing.

Instead we see that the Police have a dedicated copyright enforcement team which seems to me to be a massive subsidy to copyright holders, who presumably have the money to pay for their own legal action.

Re: This concerns me....

She won but as long as the broadcast has no pre-recorded footage or any Premier League titles etc can she feel safe. My understanding anyway, and i might be wrong.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17150054

Re: Ebay seems to be full of them

Yes can you provide links please? Cheaper the better.

I would like to try.

Hope The Register is not taken down by the same police for providing some links to such cheap hardware!

Re: Ebay seems to be full of them

Seeing as we don't know which of the many sellers have still got a shop front, but are in the process of being convicted you might want to tread carefully.

Perhaps widening your search to encompass sellers from countries that aren't busy sucking Satan's "Bill Hick". I don't know. North Korea perhaps, I don't think they have Sky there.

Re: Can someone explain to a yank what this crackdown is all about?

kodi or xbmc (originally xbox media center) client allows streaming from various sources, it is not bittorrent and the only local copy is content segments in cache nor is client distributing anything.

Kodi provide a set of legal streaming services via plugins however there are other plugin providers who provide access to the content directly from streaming host sites without the usual advertisements and malware associated with the web front ends offered across the net. Think primewire etc.

The lower cost and availiblity of ARM based single board computers such as the rasperry pi have given rise to a rash of small businesses importing chinease media players running kodi which they then install the dodgy plugins to for instant access to copied content.

Ebay, Amazon etc are also selling these same kodi boxes but since they have more than enough money to legally defend themselves FACT has targetted the small businesses instead in an attempt to suggest to the public that kodi or the freely availible plugins are in someway promoting "piracy".

FACT and the content distributors they represent hold monopolies on the distribution rights within the region and so when the content is accessed without them getting a return on their execlusivity contract then they kick up. This is very similar to the reason that the catalog on netflix in the US and then connecting outside the US has a much smaller catalog. Basically the local distributors have purchased a monopoly on who is allowed to show particular content.

That this purchased exclusivity is not dealt with like other monopolies that stiffle competition shows just how powerful these distributors are locally.

If the kodi box was sold with the suggestion that the "dodgy" content legitimately distributed to the UK then I can see that there would a case for fraud however it would be the seller's fraud of pretending that view "pirated" content was his and part of the sale and has nothign to do with kodi or the streaming sources.

Opportunity != Intent

Re: Top tip from FACT

Kodi + Exodus = happiness.

But just to be safe, folks in the USA do recommend using a VPN so that your tracks back to the various content repositories are hidden in the event that laws or enforcement priorities change.