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, 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