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An anti-piracy alliance supported by many major US and UK movie studios, broadcasters and content providers has dealt a blow to the third-party Kodi add-on scene after it successfully forced a number of popular piracy-linked streaming tools offline. In what appears to be a coordinated crackdown, developers including jsergio123 and The_Alpha, who are responsible for the development and hosting of add-ons like urlresolver, metahandler, Bennu, DeathStreams and Sportie, confirmed that they will no longer maintain their Kodi creations and have immediately shut them down.
[...] The crackdown suggests the MPA/MPAA-led Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has a thorough understanding of how owners of so-called "Kodi boxes" are able to stream TV shows and films illegally. While Colossus merely hosts the tools, urlresolver and metahandler did much of the heavy lifting for streamers. Their job was to scrape video hosting sites for relevant streaming links and serve them up for tools like Covenant inside Kodi. Streamers will find it very difficult to find working video streams of their favorite content without them, but they could reappear via a new host in the future.
Source: Hollywood strikes back against illegal streaming Kodi add-ons
Additional info at TorrentFreak and TVAddons.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Sunday November 19 2017, @01:23PM (3 children)
The sort of problem, is that the optimization of the "capitalistic system" , is that greed is baked in. Every single company has a mantra of "make profit", no matter *what* the PR dept says!
So we live in an age of massively saturated media - essentially since probably 1960, the accumulated movies, tv and music has been produced than could not possible be perceived by a human in a lifetime.
Hence, we have oversupply. By the mechanism of the "free market", the corporations that produce the media "product", introduce artificial scarcity into the market to bump up the prices.
So it may take $100,000,000 to make a movie. But does the company drop the price when they recoup $100,000,001? No.
Hence, this is the artificial scarcity "security blanket" that the $CORPs want.
Netflix and Amazon basically have said "you folks are unreasonable - we'll make our own".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 19 2017, @03:39PM
Greed is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and capitalism itself is afflicted. It's out of control in the US, with outrageously high executive pay, financialization, money recognized as "free speech", and public worship of the rich just for being rich almost no matter what crimes and robberies they've committed. That's not democracy, that's plutocracy.
Many others listened to the MAFIAA's ownership propaganda and thought they could apply it to their business, create artificial scarcities and/or engage in rent seeking with intellectual property law and DRM: Microsoft, Big Pharma, Monsanto, Keurig, Lexmark, SCO Unix, tractor manufacturers, academic publishers, and the thousands of patent trolls. But at the least their greed was too blatant, and many got a lot of blowback and had to back down. So there's hope.
#ExxonKnew
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday November 20 2017, @02:16AM (1 child)
That's just break even. Nobody makes any money breaking even.
Your example would have been better if you asked if they drop the price after they recoup $500,000,001.
But in any case, your answer of "NO" is just wrong.
First run Movies are barely finishing their first run ($8.84 average admission [hollywoodreporter.com] price in North America) when it appears on DVD and BlueRay.
Then in rental shops for well under $5, then in Netflix/Amazon essentially for free after the subscription.
The price steadily falls with time. The availability steadily increases over time. So much for artificial shortage.
But many people balk at paying even RedBox's 2 bucks a day rental price.
Then the Kodi Boxes showed up and you have a digital free-for-all.
You're right, there is greed. But its at the opposite end of the transaction from where you claim it is. Your position is that a large group of people should work day and night to provide fresh content to you, but they are only allowed ONE dollar of profit after all the bills are paid, and the loans paid off.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @08:33AM
That's an outdated view.
Nowadays, with cell phones and noisy kids, the time between a movie being shown in the cinema and being available on DVD and streaming is self-induced lost sales. Those who really want to see the movie pirate it because they can't buy it, and the rest just wait and then when the movie comes out on DVD and streaming, it's already an old movie, they've heard all the bad reviews, etc, so they don't bother watching it until they stumble upon it in the discount bin or on a free to air channel.