Android TV box.. Are they legal?

It'll just be splintered off into a separate project if official support is dropped. It's way too popular on Android boxes, tablets and phones for the community to leave drop completely imo.

It makes an interesting read.... I neither agree with nor disagree with the text, Im just sharing what I found.



Essentially, this is what I’ve been commenting about the latest wave of Kodi bashing and propaganda hogwash.

I’m an attorney with years of litigation experience. Kodi bashing has been going on for some years now, especially in the UK. Your little Google search begins with “Another Nail in Kodi’s Coffin” article from “TrustedReviews.” That, and practically every other such article picking up on this “news” came from “TorrentFreak.” You can verify that by reading the article. If you click over to the TorrentFreak article, first notice the author – Ernesto. This guy has been stirring up the slander against Kodi like forever. Here’s one from 2014: https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-site-operator-slapped-10-million-damages-141030/. Just click on his name at the site and check out the crap he’s been propagating for years. First, I guarantee you that he knows ZERO about the law. People paying attention to him have allowed him to stir up panic that is totally unsupportable. He has never actually read the case law, nor does he have a clue as to the history of streaming and copyright, what happened in the European Union, the decision of the highest court in the EU, the panic and reaction it created in stirring up and pushing for the UK to Brexit from the EU – ZERO, NOTHING.

It is beyond irresponsible to spread that kind of propaganda on behalf of the copyright claiming industry. This is reminiscent of the armies of copyright lawyers unleashed when kids began sharing music. Intimidation attempts notwithstanding, you know what happened. The movie and on demand television industries will also change. You can take that to the bank. You have not seen the same armies of copyright lawyers in the current case. For one thing. Ask yourselves why Dish TV did not sue Jeff Bezos & Amazon.

While you’re thinking about that, follow through on the scary lawsuit that has apparently sent everyone scrambling. Do you suppose Dish TV hired one of the major copyright law firms in New York or Los Angeles? I encourage you to look up who they hired and ask yourselves how high powered this great firm hired by Dish TV is. You may not know, so let me clue you in. Copyright is one of the very few specialties in the law that requires special certification. See if you can find if Dish TV’s lawyer(s) is/are certified copyright attorneys.

OK, another small lesson. Just because you file a lawsuit in a court somewhere doesn’t mean crap if you first of all don’t get the defendant personally served by a sheriff or private process server. Now, If you took a look at the Dish TV lawsuit you would find that the defendants are John Doe (1), John Doe (2), etc. Who do you think they’re going to serve? One of the named parties was a http://www.streamingboxes.com. Look them up. Where are their offices located? The Cayman Islands. So, again, who are you going to serve? If you wer in the Cayman Islands and someone flew over there to serve you with a lawsuit from Texas, I doubt you would be very worried. Have you ever gotten a letter from an out of state lawyer threatening you with a lawsuit if you don’t pay a debt? I hope you haven’t jumped to pay him. He’s gonna have a hell of a time trying to collect from you.

Now to TVaddons.ag, where do you suppose that is located? Check out the .ag extension. It turns out it is in Anguila. Again, good luck serving anybody there. Before Ernesto and his kind went on to spread more bull-**** about Kodi, they should have gone over to the Texas county courthouse and checked if Dish TV actually served somebody. There has to what is called a “return of service” in the court file along with the complaint. No real news organization would report this garbage unless and until there is actual proof of a serious complaint that looks like they have actual people and/or corporations with identifiable responsible parties under compulsion to appear and answer before a court that has obtained legal personal jurisdiction in the case.

Since you people are not lawyers, you don’t know that citing an article form the Telegraph is also complete bull-****. See the little .uk at the end of those articles? These have also been a regular staple of fear mongering. Nothing that happens in courts in the UK has any validity on anything that may happen in a court in the US. So be very careful when you pull up all the Kodi bashing irresponsible propaganda from UK media sources that are little more than press releases from copyright claiming industry. You need to look at the history of the actual cases that were brought in the UK, know that they were a panic reaction to the decision of the EU High Court denying the claim that streaming violates copyright.
That is the key issue, and everybody writing these nonsense slanderous articles have come close to examining that. Pay close attention. I guarantee you that nearly ALL these Kodi bashing articles are from the UK. Google it. I have at least twenty recent ones. This is not news. It’s a campaign.

Even MSN articles scaring people that Kodi “users” could get up to 10 years in prison is doubly irresponsible. First, again, I encourage you to check. Did you notice that website is also from the UK — http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/? Really folks, imagine that site was in, say India, or Afghanistan, or Indonesia. Get a grip. This is propaganda pure and simple. Also, any careful study of how copyright violation cases have actually been prosecuted in the US (the only relevant jurisdiction for people in the US), would reveal that 10 years in prison for an end viewer of even actual infringing content that is just freely available to anyone searching the Internet is absolute nonsense. I suppose all of you are immediately shutting your browsers when you see a video on YouTube for music that you have not actually gone out and purchased.

If you are a copyright claimer, you should focus your attention on parties actually stealing your content and publishing it, and with the universal Internet, again, good luck with that. Face it, you’re going to have to change your business model.

And, if you, or Ernesto over at TorrentFreak, or anybody, had done some research and found what has actually happened to cases brought in the US, you would have found that the greatest likelihood is that the copyright holders will settle for some type of royalty – better to get some profit than nothing at all. And, if you had actually been keeping up with what is happening in the third-party addon industry, you would also know that the trend is to turn those services in to fee serviced. They begin making money, creating an audience. A royalty settlement seems the most likely resolution.

I have long referred anyone interested in piracy claims to go watch the excellent lawyer TV Show “The Good Wife.” Season 6, Episode 17, “Undisclosed Recipients.” The copyright claimers are not going to stop this. Not only that, the very idea of copyright is a granted monopoly that was intended to last a limited time. It has muted and developed into an out of control exploitation scheme. Google “copyright gone crazy” and do some research. It is unfortunate that people do not do serious homework before being sucked in by vague, irrelevant nonsense, and it is grossly irresponsible for people who claim to be reporting news not to get properly informed before they spread someone’s self-interested propaganda.

From the defendant character accused of piracy in the referenced episode to the copyright claimer: “You know, the next killer app isn’t coming from some corporate office in Seattle or San Jose. It’s coming from some 16 year old in Warsaw to be decided by a 14 year old’s code in Mumbai. You obsess so much about copyright and ERM (Enterprise Risk Management), you’re missing what’s great about what’s going on. You’re building fences and we’re trying to tear them all down, not because we hate you, but because we’re trying to build the next big thing. So let’s do it, because it’s gonna happen either way.”

Let me know when you see a serious article on this in the Wall Street Journal or in the Journal of the American Bar Association. In the meantime, please share this and stop spreading the poop these people are shoveling.

RossieMan wrote: »

Your reading dates skills are ****e.

Why are you shooting the messenger?

This thread hadn't been used in over a year. Anyone who thinks they'll be able to shut down the likes of Kodi/internet streams is niave.