from Hacker News

How the Kodi Box Took Over Piracy

by adidash on 10/30/17, 3:36 PM with 113 comments

• by dazbradbury on 10/30/17, 4:21 PM

  "In the UK, Kodi boxes have garnered more attention from authorities, thanks to stingy soccer fanatics driving an early swell of adoption"

  This is very unfair. I don't own a Kodi box, but in the UK it's against the law to show football games on TV on Saturday between 2:45pm and 5:15pm [1]. So it's not "stingy" football fans, it's fans that have no other way to watch a 3pm kick off without actually going to the game itself. No matter how much someone may be willing to spend, a game being sold out / distance from home / time commitments etc. are all non-stingy reasons to not be able to watch a game.

  It sounds like Kodi boxes have fulfilled that desire, rather than allowing people to circumvent a paid service as the article implies.

  [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...

• by omg_ketchup on 10/30/17, 5:42 PM

  There's a massive gap between the pirate service and the "legitimate" media service.

  For one, you can just type something in, and get the movie you want. You don't have to navigate between 15 different services, and then find out the film is only available on mail-order DVD, or in other countries.

  For television, the networks are HORRIBLE about providing their content to cord-cutters. Want to watch the latest episode of Mr. Robot, which airs on Wednesday at 10pm? You're gonna have to wait AT LEAST until 9am on Thursday morning, WITH YOUR PAID SUBSCRIPTION. Or, you can pirate it for free.

  I'm not sure how many times it needs to be said, but Piracy is not a payment issue, it's an access issue.

  Also, companies being greedy is a bad look. CBS hiding Star Trek behind their proprietary $10/month service is going to kill Star Trek, because the intended audience sees it as a bullshit cash grab. Put it on Hulu you greedy bastards.

• by microcolonel on 10/30/17, 4:42 PM

  Just think for a second about the hyperbole involved in even calling it piracy. Piracy implies not only theft, which isn't applicable since there is no deprivation, but the pillage of a vessel on the high seas, and the kidnapping (and possibly enslavement, slaughter, rape, or drowning) of its crew.

  I think that this (and a whole system of) hyperbole has made it impossible to even talk about it. The MPAA and other similar organizations clutch to legalism, in my opinion, at the cost of revenues to rights holders.

  On-demand (Netflix, Hulu, HBO's online thingy, iPlayer, what have you) has been the most effective way to actually recover rights-holder revenues. If rights holders would standardize licensing, and allow a wide variety of distributors to make consuming their content more convenient and a better experience than torrenting, then their revenues would recover; and since there are more people willing and able to pay for a service like this today than when the recording industries came to be, revenue per head can be lower while still funding better content than ever.

  Added: Another working model is paid DRM-free downloads. I only buy music in open and lossless formats, which in practice means Bandcamp, a few independent online publishers (like Hospital Records), and CDs. I pay for it because I don't want to feel used while listening to music, and I don't want to rely on ongoing permission to listen to something I've paid for explicitly. This is a different stage of the on-demand/streaming userbase, when they want to have a copy of a record which lasts longer than Spotify Inc.

• by retSava on 10/30/17, 4:22 PM

  Argh, this must be so frustrating for the Kodi devs...! There really is a very strong case for running a Kodi-box for ones own legit collection, and now it's just mentioned for the (admittedly, probably) not so slight share of piracy.

  MPAA and friends has turned their eye on Kodi since a while ago, like Sauron on the little hobbitses. Could this be a submarine piece?

• by Overtonwindow on 10/30/17, 4:52 PM

  I am adamantly opposed to the MPAA in every way. The movie and television industries act more like a colluding monopoly than a business. The prices and costs have risen much too high out of greed, and by some strange quirk, they're using the legal and regulatory systems to gouge the public. This goes far beyond just pirating television shows. It's Comcast, net neutrality, set top boxes, and massive media conglomerates all rolled into one.

• by nickysielicki on 10/30/17, 7:43 PM

  Anyone else have fond memories of playing around with a modchipped original Xbox? I know I do. I think I still have that thing somewhere in a box, XECUTER3 and all.

  I don't think the article makes a big enough point about Kodi being rooted in XBMC, and XBMC being a project that started on the Xbox homebrew scene. Kodi's roots in XBMC are inherently tied to piracy, because every early developer and user had to chip their xbox, and they probably did that so that they could pirated games. That filters who is going to be contributing and using the project, so it's no surprise that movie and music piracy addons popped up with time when you consider that one of the first features of XBMC in the first place was being a launcher for pirated games.

  Don't get me wrong, XBMC always has had a legitimate and legal use case, and Kodi certainly has a legitimate and legal use today. But the roots of the project had to do with piracy and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the project attracted piracy addons and continues to.

• by bhouston on 10/30/17, 4:20 PM

  I was surprised by how prevelant these boxes are. It seems that every second family with kids has these and are streaming media to it.

  These families had no idea what torrents are, but were using pirated content basically every day and streaming it a la netflix.

  It is the future of piracy for sure. I suspect it is many many times larger in scope that torrents are currently.

  (BTW I do not have one of these.)

• by CaptSpify on 10/30/17, 9:13 PM

  It drives me insane that we keep thinking that digital goods should be treated the same as physical goods. It makes no sense to me that we think of distribution as "hard". Distribution is soooo easy, and it's effectively free. The only reason we have these gatekeepers in the way now (hbo, netflix, etc) is that we haven't figured out a way to fix our antiquated financial models.

  I don't see "piracy" as a problem, I see it as more efficient in our current situation.

• by jdhawk on 10/30/17, 8:24 PM

  I'm sure all of these boxes come pre-configured with a VPN Service, but all the standard protocols can still be detected with Deep Packet Inspection, something I've seen AT&T do (and block) pretty effectively. I guess there area always the StealthVPN/Chameleon providers out there that try and mask the signature of "what" is going over the VPN - but enough of that and I'm sure they'll nix those connections as well.

• by alistproducer2 on 10/30/17, 5:12 PM

  I would totally support micro-payments to content producers as opposed to the status quo. Until then.....Kodi all day baby! Cut the cord and never going back!

  I, however, didn't buy one pre-packaged. I did it the "hard" way and installed it on a Rpi3. If only I could play netflix on it, it would be perfect.

• by kyle-rb on 10/30/17, 11:58 PM

  >That ease applies to creating the piracy addons themselves. Since primarily all they do is find existing sites that host pirated content, grab working links, and present them in Kodi's user-friendly interface, Betzen rates the complexity about the same as creating a simple web page.

  This seems like an oversimplification. Most sites that host pirated content want you to watch that content within their website; so they can get their ad revenue and mine cryptocurrencies while you watch. They intentionally make it hard to get at their content, so in most cases, it's significantly harder than "creating a simple web page."

• by dvfjsdhgfv on 10/30/17, 7:43 PM

  I wonder how these plugins actually works. With traditional pirate sites, the business model is usually clear cut: webistes get income from ads, uploaders get money from hosting services and the latter get the money from user buying their premium accounts. With torrents, there is some exchange, too - each downloader is a seeder. But in the case of plugins?

• by SadWebDeveloper on 10/30/17, 8:59 PM

  Well most of my friend that have one those Kodi-boxes used to paid subscriptions for pirate-content IPTV providers for Roku but since Roku started to fightback and ban the most popular pirate content providers it was only matter of time before they find someone willing to sell them an alternative.

• by SadWebDeveloper on 10/30/17, 9:03 PM

  This fight will end with Kodi removing addon support on the next version and some fork taking over the work.

• by madengr on 10/30/17, 4:52 PM

  I have an Amazon Fire TV running Kodi. I use it for watching the original 26 years of Dr. Who; that’s it.