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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 15 2018, @12:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the low-hanging-fruit dept.

Netflix, Amazon and Hollywood Sue Kodi-Powered Dragon Box Over Piracy

Several major Hollywood studios, Amazon, and Netflix have filed a lawsuit against Dragon Media Inc, branding it a supplier of pirate streaming devices. The companies accuse Dragon of using the Kodi media player in combination with pirate addons to facilitate mass copyright infringement via its Dragon Box device. [...] In recent months these boxes have become the prime target for copyright enforcers, including the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an anti-piracy partnership between Hollywood studios, Netflix, Amazon, and more than two dozen other companies.

After suing Tickbox last year a group of key ACE members have now filed a similar lawsuit against Dragon Media Inc, which sells the popular Dragon Box. The complaint, filed at a California federal court, also lists the company's owner Paul Christoforo and reseller Jeff Williams among the defendants.

According to ACE, these type of devices are nothing more than pirate tools, allowing buyers to stream copyright infringing content. That also applies to Dragon Box, they inform the court. "Defendants market and sell 'Dragon Box,' a computer hardware device that Defendants urge their customers to use as a tool for the mass infringement of the copyrighted motion pictures and television shows," the complaint, picked up by HWR, reads.

Also at Ars Technica.

Rights Holders Launch Landmark Case Against 'Pirate' Android Box Sellers

Rightsholders will tread new ground today when they attempt a private prosecution of 'pirate' Android box sellers in Singapore. In what many believe is a legal gray area, SingTel, Starhub, Fox Networks Group and Premier League will seek a win in order to suppress further sales in the region. [...] Today will see these rights holders attempt to launch a pioneering private prosecution against set-top box distributor Synnex Trading and its client and wholesale goods retailer, An-Nahl. It's reported that the rights holders have also named Synnex Trading director Jia Xiaofen and An-Nahl director Abdul Nagib as defendants in their private criminal case.

[...] The importance of the case cannot be understated. While StarHub and other broadcasters have successfully prosecuted cases where people unlawfully decrypted broadcast signals, the provision of unlicensed streams isn't specifically tackled by Singapore's legislation. It's now a major source of piracy in the region, as it is elsewhere around the globe.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @04:16PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @04:16PM (#622597)

    “Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity?”

    If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.

    “Shouldn't a programmer be able to ask for a reward for his creativity?”

    There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction.

    Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.

    The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness. This is Kantian ethics; or, the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that result if everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for one to do so. Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.

    “Don't people have a right to control how their creativity is used?”

    “Control over the use of one's ideas” really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.

    People who have studied the issue of intellectual property rights carefully (such as lawyers) say that there is no intrinsic right to intellectual property. The kinds of supposed intellectual property rights that the government recognizes were created by specific acts of legislation for specific purposes.

    For example, the patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors. At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals who use patented products.

    The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of nonfiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part. The copyright system was created expressly for the purpose of encouraging authorship. In the domain for which it was invented—books, which could be copied economically only on a printing press—it did little harm, and did not obstruct most of the individuals who read the books.

    All intellectual property rights are just licenses granted by society because it was thought, rightly or wrongly, that society as a whole would benefit by granting them. But in any particular situation, we have to ask: are we really better off granting such license? What kind of act are we licensing a person to do?

    The case of programs today is very different from that of books a hundred years ago. The fact that the easiest way to copy a program is from one neighbor to another, the fact that a program has both source code and object code which are distinct, and the fact that a program is used rather than read and enjoyed, combine to create a situation in which a person who enforces a copyright is harming society as a whole both materially and spiritually; in which a person should not do so regardless of whether the law enables him to.

    “Won't everyone stop programming without a monetary incentive?”

    Actually, many people will program with absolutely no monetary incentive. Programming has an irresistible fascination for some people, usually the people who are best at it. There is no shortage of professional musicians who keep at it even though they have no hope of making a living that way.

    But really this question, though commonly asked, is not appropriate to the situation. Pay for programmers will not disappear, only become less. So the right question is, will anyone program with a reduced monetary incentive? My experience shows that they will.

    For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have had anywhere else. They got many kinds of nonmonetary rewards: fame and appreciation, for example. And creativity is also fun, a reward in itself.

    Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same interesting work for a lot of money.

    What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned.

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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by tibman on Monday January 15 2018, @05:38PM (1 child)

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 15 2018, @05:38PM (#622633)

    “Control over the use of one's ideas” really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.

    You're saying every product you can buy in a store is usually used to make people's lives more difficult. Don't be crazy.

    You say that copyright for books was fine back on the original printing press. So you are somewhat okay with a creator exercising control of their creations. But then you say copyrighting a program is "harming society as a whole both materially and spiritually" because it is used rather than read and enjoyed. The consumption of the thing isn't the point of copyright. It's the copying! To make this more fun, if you are okay with copyright protecting books then what about ebooks? The exact same amount of work went into writing the paperbook and ebook. Only the distribution model is different.

    OT:


    I have the feeling your key issue is the ease of copying something more than what that something is. That's a dangerous argument because as technology advances it will get easier and easier to copy anything and everything. Including you! You probably wouldn't want someone cloning you to be a submissive dungeon sex slave for eternity streamed live to the world 24/7 for advertising revenue, lol.
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    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 15 2018, @08:35PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 15 2018, @08:35PM (#622710) Journal

      You're saying every product you can buy in a store is usually used to make people's lives more difficult.

      No, I don't think that he said that at all. What I saw, when I read his post, was that people who own "intellectual property" want unwarranted control over their products, and hence, the customer, after they have bought the product.

      Consider the Windows operating system(s). You have several different "levels" of the Windows operating system. Home, student, professional, server, and more. So, the home user, and the student are probably looking for the cheapest version of Windows they can get. The professional wants something better, and server is server - you pay a premium for those options enabled in server versions.

      But, let's do a full stop right there. "Options enabled in server" means exactly what it says. One of my pet peeves, early in the days of Windows, was that ONLY ONE PERSON CAN LOG INTO WINDOWS PROFESSIONAL AT A TIME. When the wife was sitting in front of the computer, and I logged in remotely to do something, THE SYSTEM LOCKED HER SCREEN! Of course, she whined, moaned, and logged right back in, which then locked my account. Uhhh, why is that? Well, it's not a lack of ability - it is Windows policy. If you want multiple active logins, you must purchase one version or another of Windows Server.

      Linux? There really isn't any "server version". Take any version of Linux, and however many people have accounts on the machine can all log in at the same time. Doesn't matter if they have a dumb terminal, or they're logging in from the internet, they can all log in at the same time. (Of course, if you have limited resources - memory, CPU, disk access, things are going to slow down, but the system won't limit the number of active logged in accounts.)

      And, look at the pricing for those server installations. The cheapest are several times the cost of Windows Pro.

      THAT is the kind of thing that GP was addressing. The "owners" of "Intellectual Property" want to control you, and how you use their products. The only "legal" way to gain access to all the abilities within their systems, is to submit to extortion. Pay, and pay, and keep on paying.

      That crap is reprehensible - or worse.