UK Piracy Body Threatens Kodi Users

Kodi, the popular open source media centre, has been under attack for some time. Sales of pre-loaded Kodi “piracy boxes” are now prohibited in Europe, while TVADDONS, one of the top Kodi repositories, recently closed. Now, UK copyright body FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft) is gearing up to attack Kodi users themselves.

Kodi’s Relationship With Piracy

While Kodi itself is merely a media player, a number of high-profile pirate streaming apps trashed the software’s reputation.  Thanks to the bleating of ignorant reactionaries, Kodi is now synonymous with piracy. However, Kodi’s developers continually protest against piracy add-ons while still maintaining the player’s open source design. Though, no matter how often or loudly its developers oppose piracy, mud sticks.

FACT Threatens Kodi Users

While FACT’s primary focus is to investigate those who make money from Kodi piracy add-ons, the body is widening its scope to end users, too. FACT Chief Executive Kieron Sharp told The Independent:

“What we’ve been looking at in conjunction with many of our clients and members are the different levels of crime being committed. 

There’s the manufacture and importation of devices, and then the distribution and selling of those. We’re also looking at the people who are providing the apps and add-ons, the developers.

And then we’ll also be looking at, at some point, the end user. The reason for end users to come into this is that they are committing criminal offences.”

Records of Sale

Kodi users under threat include those that bought pre-loaded boxes from sellers investigated by the police. FACT will use sale records from these sellers to pursue potential cases against users. Sharp explained:

“When we’re working with the police against a company that’s selling IPTV boxes or illicit streaming devices on a large scale, they have records of who they’ve sold them to. 

It’s part of the work that we do with the police that we have to look at the whole business there, and start investigating those that have been buying these devices. 

At the moment, where that will lead we don’t know. We have a number of cases coming before the courts in terms of those people who have been providing, selling and distributing illicit streaming devices. It’s something for the very near future, when we’ll consider whether we go any further than that, in terms of customers.”