back to article European Court of Justice lays down the law on Kodipocalypse

Europe's highest court has made it easier for member states to halt the sale of media sticks with preloaded pirate streaming links and add-ons. The past few months have seen significant growth in pre-configured streaming boxes or USB sticks. These use the Kodi platform, an open-source player, configured by a vendor with add- …

  1. Michael Habel

    Tl;dr

    So what's the gist of the judgement again?

    1. wub

      Re: Tl;dr

      Wow. It's a wonder you get anything done...

      Try under the main title, where it says, "In short, stop flogging players with pirate add-ons".

      At the risk of causing your eyes to cross again, I'd have to say that I don't have a problem with this decision. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of products that would sell a lot better if they included stuff for free that usually costs extra. Maybe my next Toyota could come with some goodies in the glove box, like a nice Rolex watch for me, and Tiffany earrings for the misses? Real ones, mind. None of those knock-offs.

      I really like Kodi. I can get along without the pirated content. I just hope the guys selling these boxes don't end up killing off the project all together.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So what's the gist of the judgement again?

      Instead of boxes coming pre-loaded they'll now just come with a script for the user to run and help them install the add-ons themselves.

  2. Daniel von Asmuth
    Pirate

    It's about time

    It's about time for the nationals of the European continent to exit the Kingdom Union.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's about time

      Ah, a connoisseur, you like methanol in you knock off spirits then?

  3. Timbo

    mmmmmmmmmm...

    So, nothing to stop you buying a KODI box and adding the correct software yourself...but EU law is now clarified to the point where it will be illegal for retailers to sell boxes with any such software pre-installed.

    One assumes, further, that it may become illegal to pass any directions as to where you can find the instructions on how to install such software.

    Good luck with that !!

    1. Charles 9

      Re: mmmmmmmmmm...

      "One assumes, further, that it may become illegal to pass any directions as to where you can find the instructions on how to install such software."

      Directly, probably, but that kind of information is also easier to pass along INdirectly.

    2. streaky

      Re: mmmmmmmmmm...

      So, nothing to stop you buying a KODI box and adding the correct software yourself...but EU law is now clarified to the point where it will be illegal for retailers to sell boxes with any such software pre-installed.

      Inevitable consequence honestly. I've been saying for years this would happen and now it does and everybody is looking around at each other in a state of dismay. Not a comment on piracy a comment on trying to sell these as piracy devices. Legal systems wouldn't let you sell a tool that can unlock and start the engine of any car as a tool for stealing cars either. Don't advertise them that way is the first step in there not being an issue.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: mmmmmmmmmm...

      It's illegal to sell fake Levi jeans.

      It's not illegal for you to get instructions on how to make your own and then make them for you to wear, so long as you never try to pass them off as genuine.

      It's the selling that's the real issue

    4. nijam Silver badge

      Re: mmmmmmmmmm...

      > One assumes, further, that it may become illegal to pass any directions as to where you can find the instructions on how to install such software.

      Since URLs are not (and never were) any more a "communication to the public" than telephone numbers, yours is the only possible interpretation of the ruling (i.e. it is not the URL per se, but telling people about it, that constitutes a "communication to the public"). Your only error is in using the wrong tense: "may become" rather than "is".

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Question about these pirate Kodi sticks

    Has someone hacked legitimate services (breaking the encryption or whatever) or does it connect to separate 'pirate' sites where legitimate access to a service is being redistributed illegally to many?

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Question about these pirate Kodi sticks

      I think it's mainly the latter. Content management systems are getting hardened enough for the former to not be too feasible these days barring a hole.

      1. seeker-666

        Re: Question about these pirate Kodi sticks

        "deliberately and in full knowledge of the circumstances." is the answer to your thoughts

  5. Your alien overlord - fear me

    "deliberately and in full knowledge of the circumstances." - I beg to differ. If I ask my parents to buy it for me for my birthday/Christmas I can assure the ECJ that my parents are way too techie illiterate to be in full knowledge of anything (they're in their 70's bless 'em) and they are the purchasers under consumer law.

    I think the Euro lawyers best cancel their holidays whilst they sort this one out,

    1. Charles 9

      Couldn't they just construe that YOU are the REAL real buyer and they are just agents acting on your behalf? That's how they nail murder-for-hires.

  6. Wade Burchette

    Do you know what would deter pirates?

    Do you know what would deter pirates? If it was super easy and cheap to legally get the sports, movies, tv shows, and other content that we want. The stupid myopic media moguls are so wedded to the old way of thinking that they don't realize there is a gold mine within arm's reach. And they can have it for very little work. Their entire collections, and not some limited subset for a limited time, needs to be available at a fair price to content distributors, such as Netflix. And make it easy for people to watch the movies they purchased and not force us to go through 25 unskippable things before the movie even starts.

    Why bother watching a pirate stream of a movie from 2016 if I can watch it on Amazon Prime? Why bother downloading a torrent of the 1941 classic Citizen Kane if I can stream it from Netflix anytime? Copyright infringement exists because it fills a need that the moronic media moguls are too greedy and stubborn to satisfy. And so their answer to the need being met is to make it harder for those who play by the restrictive rules to be punished more while the rulebreakers find away around in a few days. Which causes harsher rules, and a cycle repeated ad infinitum.

    Copyright infringement will always exist, but it can be greatly reduced if the content providers adapt.

    1. Gavin Chester
      Meh

      Re: Do you know what would deter pirates?

      Have to echo that sentiment.

      I'd happily pay for the Sky F1 channel but I can only get it if I subscribe to the sports package, and I've no interest at all in football. £27 for, on average, two races a month is too much especially as I would guess a chunk of that goes to buy football rights. Sky Sports is a 8 channel bundle, if they package F1 separately for a reasonable cost (say a fiver or so, as I doubt it would be as simple as charging an 1/8 of the bundle price) I'd be interested.

      End result I watch it on Channel 4, Sky get nothing from me, the rights holders get whatever C4 pay, I could get it by Kodi but I can't be bothered.

      I understand F1 is a high cost sport, maybe I'm not rabid enough of a F1 fan to pay the extra money, but the side effect is I'm watching less races , I'm less likely to buy any merchandise for the teams, I'm not so bothered if I miss a race either, and that's not good for the sport long term to lose viewers.

      1. FlossyThePig

        Re: Do you know what would deter pirates?

        @Gavin Chester

        ...F1 is a high cost sport...

        A few years ago* I went to a talk given by Adrian Newey. One of his opening remarks was roughly "I can't tell you our budget, but we employ over 200 people whose job is to let 2 very wealthy men drive very quickly in circles for a couple a couple of hours every two weeks".

        I lost interest in F1 when enforced pitstops became the norm and races were won more by team tactics than the very wealthy man in the car.

        * Oh shit it was over 20 years ago.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Do you know what would deter pirates?

      I think you pretty much nailed it there.

      The problem is that in a typical fashion only shortermist gains and profits are looked at. Not the long game where people become more tech savvy will find ways to get the content for free as they are fed up with Murdoch et al going in dry and then sitting on a pile of cash.

      A cost effective subscription (something like Sports Donkey without the questionable legality) would kill the need stone dead, short term profits would be hit but long term they would make more as people flocked to the system and didn't desert it when they are fed up of being screwed over.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Do you know what would deter pirates?

      Similar could be said of TV Shows that air in the US, weeks or sometimes even months ahead of the UK, risking Spoilers.

      Make them available, and affordable. I'd happily pay 50p an episode to buy and watch it the day after it airs in the US instead of torrenting it. Unfortunately by the time most show air in the UK, spoilers and conversation about the episodes\series are already all over social media.

      Incidentally, I have an Amazon Prime, Netflix and Sky Subscription, so as far as I'm concerned with TV shows I'm doing nothing more than glorified time-shifting. The Studios are still getting their money.

      I don't as a point believe in torrenting movies that are still on circuit. I don't mind downloading the odd one if I'm intending to get in on BluRay or already own it on BluRay and want a digital copy that I can watch through Kodi.

    4. julian.smith

      Re: Do you know what would deter pirates?

      Delightfully, they can't adapt so they will die.

    5. Charles 9

      Re: Do you know what would deter pirates?

      "Copyright infringement will always exist, but it can be greatly reduced if the content providers adapt."

      You forget. Once their media's cut loose, they lose their repeat business which they need to continue existing. Plus these things cost money and they need to recoup it. Have you considered that your model may not be enough to get it back? Unless you can provide actual hard numbers to support this? And don't use the music industry as a basis since their overheads are much lower being they don't have to cater to eyes.

  7. tiggity Silver badge

    pre loaded

    I have a kodi box - never used the preloaded addons.

    Mainly used to stream content from PVR & watch iPlayer via local network (dumb TV so need a device for iPlayer)

    Buying a non preloaded kodi box was essentially impossible - they all (at the cheap price points I was looking at) came preloaded, so not really a choice of a "clean" kodi box.

    I'm sure plenty of people wanted a pirate box, however I'm sure others, like me, ended yup with preloaded box because there was no other choice easily available.

    .. Only got one as previous solution (using old mobile to talk to PVR) sometimes gave a poor picture as affected by iffy wifi signal if other people in house hammering wifi, and kodi box came with RJ45 connection so could be cabled & not subject to wifi vagaries

    Preloaded is PITA - mine was set to autoupdate addons too, so it was using bandwidth periodically downloading updates that would never be used

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: pre loaded

      "Buying a non preloaded kodi box was essentially impossible "

      I beg to differ, I've been running kodi (via osmc) and it's predecessor (xmbc) on a raspberry pi for about 4 years now and I've never even considered installing add-ons to allow access to pirated streams. I'd recommend using a Pi 2 or Pi 3 rather than a Pi zero though.

    2. Jay 2

      Re: pre loaded

      I did briefly look at buying a (dedicated) Kodi box, mainly to stream from my NAS, not for all the dodgy stuff. I decided against it in the end as many reviews were quite hit and miss and I wasn't convinced about the offered hardware and more importantly the OS on top.

      So in the end I plumped for an Amazon Fire TV box and sideloaded Kodi on myself. I'd like to think that Amazon will do a slightly better job of keeping FireOS up to date than whatver the dedicated Kodi boxes run. In a slight belt-and-braces approach I also sideloaded Kodi on my new smart TV last weekend. I'm a bit more concerned on how much effort Sony will put into keeping that Android setup supported though.

    3. Scuby

      Re: pre loaded

      Pi Hut sell Kits with the OpenElec disti preinstalled on a memory card.

      https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-kits-and-bundles/products/raspberry-pi-3-media-centre-kit

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: pre loaded

        And the Vero, although personally, I just use a couple of Pi 2's with OSMC installed.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: pre loaded

          Pi's tend to struggle a bit at high-def, and I don't think they can do HEVC-encoded videos. I DID plunk down for an Android box once. Claims to be quad-core and all that, but it seems to chug a lot and the interface is rather clunky (that said, I only sank $25 into it, so I'm not out that much).

  8. earl grey
    Facepalm

    Oh, thank the googly one

    They've surely stopped piracy dead in its tracks.

    /s

  9. seeker-666

    "deliberately and in full knowledge of the circumstances."

    Thus ALL users who buy en empty kodi and install addons to watch copyrighted material are liable to prosecution since they did it "deliberately and in full knowledge of the circumstances."

    Is this the correct interpretation ? If true then we are all doomed.

    Any input from lawyers would be appreciated.

  10. Keith_Rhodes
    WTF?

    Kodi is not only for cheapskates who want the Premier League for free...

    The extract of the ECJ ruling quoted in the article: "the main attraction of that player for potential purchasers is the pre-installation of the [streaming] add-ons".

    I put together a Kodi player for myself: a Raspberry Pi 3, and case and a power supply and about an hour of my time assembling, downloading, installing, connecting up the cables.

    And why? Well I'm not interested in watching streamed Premier League matches or stuff like that.

    I have a big collection of films on DVD, but I often find that the dialogue is too quiet and the sound effects too loud, so whenever I buy a DVD I rip it to my NAS and at the same time compress the dynamic range of the soundtrack a little. This also means no searching through shelves of discs and fiddling with silly jewel cases that get dropped and cracked, or with discs being left out and getting scratched.

    But the big problem with having my films on a NAS? About 18 months after buying my TV set I found out that Samsung had crippled the media playback software: the player stops after about one hour and fifty minutes... I discovered this when watching Bridge over the river Kwai: it's a 2h 41min film. And I can't just stop the film before the software bombs out, then restart from that point. The software is simply incapable of reading beyond about 1h 50mins into a film.

    Wikipedia tells us that "in 2009, Samsung sold around 31 million flat-panel televisions", so has probably sold hundreds of millions of devices with this crippled software, and I'm almost certainly not alone in having turned to Kodi to fix Samsungs failing; the ECJ claims that "the main attraction of that player for potential purchasers is the pre-installation of the [streaming] add-ons", but for many the main attraction of Kodi is that it is much easier to use that commercial software, and it even *gets the job done*, unlike the commercial alternative built into the Samsung set.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like