Canadian Telcos Lose Their Goddamn Minds Over TVAddons

Canadian Telcos Lose Their Goddamn Minds Over TVAddons

7 years ago
Anonymous $Gu9VYqcl-R

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170805/01182537930/canadian-telcos-lose-their-goddamn-minds-over-tvaddons.shtml

For years, we've expressed general bewilderment at the practice in British Commonwealth countries to effectively allow private search warrants, which are given to non-government private parties, engaged in civil infringement cases, to effectively break down other people's doors and dig through their stuff. We've discussed such "Anton Piller" orders in Australia and the UK. And, apparently they apply in Canada too.

And that leads us to the craziest damn story you'll ever read about a bunch of private companies losing their freaking minds over something they believe is infringing. In this case, it's the site TVAddons, which is a site that links to various Kodi software add-ons. Kodi, if you're unaware, is open source home theater software (it was originally the Xbox Media Center, XBMC, but has expanded since then). It's quite popular and an easy way to use a device with Kodi to turn your TV into a smart TV. There are tons of perfectly legitimate and non-infringing uses for Kodi, and a variety of sources of "Kodi boxes" that allow people to make use of the features and to install a variety of useful apps -- such as adding YouTube or Netflix to your TV. Admittedly, there are some add-ons that allow users to access infringing content, though even those add-ons are just really linking to content stored openly and available online.