Kodi Wants to Beat Piracy With Legal Content and DRM

[shamu726]

The group behind the popular Kodi software is not happy that their media player is often linked to piracy. Copyright holders would like Kodi to block certain pirate add-ons, but the team doesn't believe that would be effective. Instead, they're inviting rightsholders to join their platform and are considering the addition of DRM to make that easier.

 

Millions of people use Kodi as their main source of entertainment, often with help from add-ons that allow them to access pirated movies and TV-shows.

 

As Kodi’s popularity has increased drastically over the past two years, so have complaints from copyright holders.

 

While Kodi itself is a neutral platform, unauthorized add-ons give it a bad name. This is one of the reasons why the Kodi team is actively going after vendors who sell “fully loaded” pirate boxes and YouTubers who misuse their name to promote copyright infringement.

 

Interestingly, the Kodi team itself didn’t help its case by putting up an FBI seizure notice last week, as an April Fools gag.

 

The banner suggested that the site had been taken down by the US Department of Justice for copyright infringement. Downloads of the latest builds of the software were also blocked.

 

Kodi’s April Fools gag
 

 

This week TorrentFreak spoke with several members of the Kodi team, operating under the XBMC Foundation, who made it clear that they want to cooperate with rightsholders instead of being accused of facilitating piracy.

 

The team told us that copyright holders regularly approach them. Some are well informed and know that Kodi itself isn’t actively involved in anything piracy related. However, according to XBMC Foundation President Nathan Betzen, there are also those who are fooled by misleading media reports or YouTube videos.

 

“There are rightsholders that know who we are and realize we are distinct from the 3rd party add-on crowd,” Betzen says.

 

“And then there are the rights holders who have been successfully taken in by the propaganda, who write us very legal sounding letters because some random YouTuber or ‘news’ website described the author of a piracy add-on as a ‘Kodi developer’.”

 

The Kodi team doesn’t mind being approached by people who are misinformed, as it gives them an opportunity to set the record straight. It has proven to be more challenging to find a way forward with movie studios and other content creators that are aware of Kodi’s position.

 

These movie industry representatives sometimes ask Kodi to remove third-party repo installs and block certain pirate add-ons. However, according to XBMC Foundation’s Project lead Martijn Kaijser, this isn’t the direction Kodi wants to go in.

 

“Our view on this is that [removing code] would not help a bit, because the code is open-source and others can easily revert it. Blocking add-ons won’t help since they would instantly change the addon and the block would be in vain,” Kaijser tells us.

 

The Kodi team feels that pirates are leeching off their infrastructure and put the entire community at risk. But, instead of taking a repressive approach they would like to see more legal content providers join their platform. With an audience of millions of users, there is a lot of untapped potential on a platform that’s rapidly growing.

 

To facilitate this process, the media player is currently considering whether to add support for DRM so that content providers can offer their videos in a protected environment. While some users may cringe at the thought, Kodi believes it’ll help to get rightsholders on board.

 

“Our platform has a lot of potential and we are looking into attracting more legal and official content providers. Additionally, we’re looking into adding low-level DRM that would at least make it more feasible to gain trust from certain providers,” Kaijser tells TorrentFreak.

 

Kodi addons
 

 

Although Kodi does go after sellers of pirate boxes, Betzen personally doesn’t believe that this is the answer. The best way to deal with the piracy issue is to offer more legal content through official add-ons.

 

“We’d like to actually work with content providers to have official add-ons in our network. That’s much easier to do when we are proactively attempting to help them to fight copyright infringement,” Betzen says.

 

There are already plenty of legal uses for Kodi, including the DVR system, support for legal sports streaming, and a variety of add-ons such as Crunchyroll, HDHomeRun, Plex and Twitch. However, getting some major content providers on board has proven to be quite a challenge thus far.

 

Kaijser notes that rightsholders have been very reserved thus far. He tried to convince content providers to offer official add-ons, or even turn some community made ones into official ones, but hasn’t had much success.

 

In a way, the repeated piracy discussions and news items are both a blessing and a curse for Kodi. They help to grow the platform at a rate most competitors could only dream of, while at the same time keeping rightsholders at bay. Time will tell if Kodi can turn this around.

 

 

Source: TorrentFreak

 

[steven36]

I  have addons in Firefox that let me watch videos from streaming sites in 3rd party players  and  it don't  link  none of these apps to piracy .. They get upset and ruin there media center with DRM and things they will lose  most of there users or people just want update anymore . look at all the people who still uses older uTorrent  because they added ads to  the program if they  was too only let people download legal torrents No one would update and the ones who like updates would switch too something else.

 

A good example of this was Frostwire when they done away with the  Gnutella client they lost most of there users and still there are  apps out there  that will let you  download  from  Gnutella  so it did not die completely out because of Limewire closing up  . But it would of had more users still  if  Frostwire would not of not changed . Frostwire use too be a very hip fileshareing program that is even on the front page here and really no more than uses it today it really should not  be front page because they became a over bloated  BitTorrent program only.

 

Kodi making bad business decisions want hurt piracy at all  it will only cause people to seek out new alternatives or just use old versions so in the long term  it hurts no one but Kodi and people running scams selling free software on  these boxes .  I dont use Kodi and never have  and if they give people a reason many active users well leave it too and they will become just another over bloated media center if they put too many  restrictions on it.

 

Sorry that's the most dumbest thing i ever heard of . DRM has never been proven to hurt  piracy at  all. it just causes people to crack DRM and get around it. Only thing that hurt piracy is free media and since videos have DRM and region restrictions it actuality helps piracy. When they can go too  p2p , streaming sites and filelocker sites and get DRM free media and many have used this as a excuse  to not buy Media because you have too buy 3rd party programs to remove DRM.

 

All DRM does is open software up  to being hacked  . All  using  DRM to stream is choosing convenience over security and privacy for the end user if they pay for DRM content witch people who dont buy there media want never buy it no ways

 

Already Android have a nice fork of Kodi called  SPMC

https://github.com/koying/SPMC/releases

 

[I4rg£8all8ag]

Totally agree, best fork out there is SPMC, faster and more cleaner, use it daily. 

[CrAKeN]

 

Two weeks ago, XBMC Foundation President Nathan Betzen said that the company is considering adding support for "low-level DRM" in its Kodi application. On the Kodi blog, the firm has reiterated and expanded on this prospect, although it's still not making a final decision.

 

The reason that XBMC is thinking about adding DRM (Digital Rights Management) support is because Kodi has found itself in a tough spot. Add-ons that are specifically designed for piracy have become increasingly popular, and the media center platform is becoming known to the layman as something that's illegitimate.

 

Quote

Thanks to a bunch of ill-informed idiots on YouTube posing as Kodi experts and shady vendors looking to make a quick buck off our backs and take advantage of gullible people, Kodi is generally portrayed as a piracy platform. Meanwhile, Team Kodi takes all the heat. Add to that lazy article authors on several news and media sites and we have the perfect storm. Sadly, for many article authors, hearsay is actually a credible source and click bait their living.

 

And that's something that the XBMC Foundation wants to fix. In one example, it says that, "Android ships with software that plays back DRMed content from Netflix. Kodi could hook into this already existing software in Android to playback the same content, so you never have to leave Kodi."

 

A major point in the blog post is that DRM is nothing to be upset about. It's meant to provide additional functionality to the app, rather than take it away. The Foundation is simply hoping that this additional feature-set will promote legitimate use of Kodi.

 

The team also made four promises:

 

Quote

- Kodi will never provide content, DRMed or not.
- Kodi will never stop working with your content.
- We will never prevent you from using Kodi as you so choose.
- We do not condone, condemn, encourage or recommend any particular use of Kodi.

 

The point that's really being made here is that you needn't worry about being restricted in your usage of Kodi. As Nathan Betzen pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the software is open-source, meaning that even if XBMC attempted to place some controls on it, that could easily be subverted by the open-source community.

 

Still, the team is deciding whether allowing the playback of DRMed content "would be considered unethical". There are still discussions going on internally, and it seems like it will be a little while before a decision is made.

 

Source

[Batu69]

Topic by @CrAKeN

Moved from Technology News & merged.

[Sylence]

If they do it they kill the main reason why people use it