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posted by mrpg on Sunday November 19 2017, @09:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-use-an-anon-ftp dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @02:49AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @02:49AM (#599122)

    Be careful. I live in the U.S. and don't have a TV or antenna, but The Orville is broadcast over the airwaves, so it seems fair to be able to watch each episode once. I haven't torrented OTA TV shows for years, haven't been watching TV shows as much in general, but as a Trek fan, I wanted to see if the show was any good. So I went to TPB and downloaded the first two episodes. They downloaded very quickly, and I was going to watch them later that night.

    Less than 60 minutes after the torrents completed, I had voicemails on my cell phone from my cable ISP saying that I had downloaded copyrighted content, with a live human being's voice on the other end.

    I was shocked, not so much that the studios' minions are monitoring the torrents, but that their system is so efficient, and that the ISPs (or, at least, some of them) are so integrated with them that within an hour of downloading a torrent, they were calling me on the phone! This, for a show broadcast freely over-the-air.

    So, if that's how they want to do things, fine. I deleted the Orville episodes without watching them, and I will not be watching any of that show, ever. They have alienated me as a potential fan. No big loss, can't stand Seth McFarlane anyway.

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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Monday November 20 2017, @05:43AM

    by anubi (2828) on Monday November 20 2017, @05:43AM (#599159) Journal

    I guess they will consider success when they find the general public much like me. I was not even aware of Orville.

    And do not have much incentive to find out.

    I guess I am a model consumer for Hollywood. I do not pirate. Hell, I could probably go to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and only recognize five or six stars out of the whole shebang. Yup, the kind of guy Hollywood would lobby Congress for. I take more interest in a discarded soda can than pirating their stuff.

    I spend much more of my time on stuff like posting stuff like this, reading the same kind of stuff that others posted, and actually *being* with friends. I just don't have that much time for Hollywood anymore. They became too much of a pain in the ass with their relentless ads. As far as I am concerned, the whole Hollywood community has become much like a roadway in terrible repair, mottled with so many large potholes that took several minutes each to navigate, that I completely gave up even trying to use that method.

    I don't believe Hollywood is going to notice much until they start putting their movie "star" posters up and people ignore them like they would a poster of our 14'th president ( I don't know who that was either! ).

    Piracy will be the least of their concerns when the public no longer considers them even worth the time to watch.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
  • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday November 20 2017, @09:15AM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Monday November 20 2017, @09:15AM (#599198) Homepage Journal

    I understand, but I'd need a really good antenna to pick up the shows, since I live in Europe. Moreover, downloading here is explicitly accepted (uploaded would be illegal), so leeching a torrent is fine.

    The thing I just don't understand is: why doesn't the producer sell rights to the show. Put up their own download links, for a cheap-but-reasonable price, and they'd put the pirates out of business. For all of us outside this US, this is money they are not getting. There's zero loss to them, only gain, for actually selling their products.

    As for your experience, I totally understand why you were surprised. As you say, they are teaching the wrong lessons: next time you want to download, you'll use a VPN.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @04:26PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @04:26PM (#599280)

    Magnet links, VPN, and encrypt your torrent stream, bro.

    • (Score: 2) by gottabeme on Tuesday November 21 2017, @05:46AM

      by gottabeme (1531) on Tuesday November 21 2017, @05:46AM (#599554)

      TPB only uses magnet links. DHT doesn't stop them from monitoring.

      Ditto for encryption. I have unencrypted torrent connections disabled. It's not a MitM attack; they monitor the torrent by acting as a client. I use updated blocklists, but obviously they're not enough.

      A VPN is basically the answer, yes. Can you recommend a good one?