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Following a high-profile order at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this summer, copyright holders are facing a roadblock in their quest to demand settlements from alleged file-sharers. Referencing the August order, federal courts in districts across the US are demanding more evidence than an IP-address alone.
[...] In recent weeks, however, more and more judges have begun to ask questions.
This started after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reached a verdict in Cobbler Nevada v. Gonzales. The Court ruled that identifying the registered subscriber of an IP-address by itself is not enough to argue that this person is also the infringer.
"Because multiple devices and individuals may be able to connect via an IP address, simply identifying the IP subscriber solves only part of the puzzle. A plaintiff must allege something more to create a reasonable inference that a subscriber is also an infringer," the verdict read.
[...] What's clear though is that the Appeals Court ruling is being used by courts across the country to demand "something more" than an IP-address alone.
While this is not the end of so-called "copyright trolling" practices just yet, it does make it harder for rightsholders to convince the courts.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/courts-want-something-more-than-an-ip-address-to-catch-pirates-181217/
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday December 21 2018, @08:24PM (1 child)
Isn't the problem with Kodi is that it uses public trackers and runs a local torrent client? That's the number one reason I never adopted it. I didn't want that traffic on my local network, and then be added to some MAFIAA list of infringers to try and go after.
It does sound like it makes using streaming sources a lot easier and safer.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 21 2018, @11:40PM
Kodi [wikipedia.org] doesn't endorse criminal activity whatsoever. A clean install is just a media player and file organizer.
You need to add third-party addons in order to get the "illicit" stuff. Even then, one of the main sites associated with addons, TVAddons.co, does not host the actual addons but simply publishes a tongue-in-cheek transparency report [tvaddons.co] that tells you their names and gives you a clue about where to get them. Some are on GitHub, others are in various repositories that you manually add to Kodi using the URL.
This guide explains how most addons work [koditips.com] (excuse any bad English). In a nutshell, most addons scrape metadata from centralized websites in order to show you what's available, popular, etc., and then handle the process of "resolving" the content, which entails grabbing the video directly while cutting through ads, redirects, and other crap.
Some sources, such as Openload, have gotten hip to Kodi users and require you to solve a captcha on an advertisement page at your IP address. Then you can look at the content for X hours.
There are some addons that don't use the scrape/resolve model, including torrent-based addons, but they are rare:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]