Piracy 3.0: The Good, the Bad and Kodi (Guest Column)
by Mitch Singer
When Hollywood filmmaker Jeremy Culver releases his next movie – the romantic indie comedy “No Postage Necessary” – in June, he will take title to having the first feature distributed with the help of blockchain technology.
As Culver put it in a press release announcing his movie, “There are many advantages to blockchain distribution, including immutable proof of intellectual property rights, transparent royalty payments and, since all data on the blockchain is resistant to duplication, we can now envision a world where films are no longer pirated.”
...it is ineffective as an anti-piracy tool.
That’s because humans are analog beings...
And if I can see it, I can copy it.
Welcome Kodi, which takes piracy to a whole new level. Let’s call it “Piracy 3.0” – after the earlier eras of Piracy 1.0 for discs and Piracy 2.0 for p2p/torrents – by offering an open-source streaming media player giving users a simple, easy-to-use media center to organize and access all of their digital media content.
As a media center application, there is nothing illegal about Kodi software, which provides plug-ins for you to add YouTube and other OTT channels. Regrettably, however, there are also downloadable add-ons that take advantage of Kodi’s open-source platform. They enable users to get free access to copyrighted live sports, pay television series such as “Game of Thrones,” along with unlimited Hollywood movies and television shows.
To make matters worse, the piracy-enabling add-ons are fairly easy to install and use – made even easier by the abundance of YouTube instructional videos showing you exactly how to install them. One notable example is “Exodus,” an add-on that gives you access to all new movies and TV shows. It is an app that locates versions of the movie or television content for which you are searching across thousands of global Internet servers. Looking for 1080p? 5.1 surround sound? No problem.
Take-downs of these add-ons are especially ineffective because they are not “channels” streaming content in the traditional sense. Rather, they are pirate directory services to provide only Internet links. Get rid of one “channel” and there are 10 more just like it with the same exact links.
See the full story here: http://variety.com/2018/digital/opinion/piracy-3-0-the-good-the-bad-and-kodi-guest-column-1202785603/