Millions of people use Kodi as their main source of entertainment, often with help from add-ons that allow them to access pirated movies and TV-shows.

As Kodi’s popularity has increased drastically over the past two years, so have complaints from copyright holders.

While Kodi itself is a neutral platform, unauthorized add-ons give it a bad name. This is one of the reasons why the Kodi team is actively going after vendors who sell “fully loaded” pirate boxes and YouTubers who misuse their name to promote copyright infringement.

Interestingly, the Kodi team itself didn’t help its case by putting up an FBI seizure notice last week, as an April Fools gag.

The banner suggested that the site had been taken down by the US Department of Justice for copyright infringement. Downloads of the latest builds of the software were also blocked.

Kodi’s April Fools gag

This week TorrentFreak spoke with several members of the Kodi team, operating under the XBMC Foundation, who made it clear that they want to cooperate with rightsholders instead of being accused of facilitating piracy.

The team told us that copyright holders regularly approach them. Some are well informed and know that Kodi itself isn’t actively involved in anything piracy related. However, according to XBMC Foundation President Nathan Betzen, there are also those who are fooled by misleading media reports or YouTube videos.

“There are rightsholders that know who we are and realize we are distinct from the 3rd party add-on crowd,” Betzen says.

“And then there are the rights holders who have been successfully taken in by the propaganda, who write us very legal sounding letters because some random YouTuber or ‘news’ website described the author of a piracy add-on as a ‘Kodi developer’.”

The Kodi team doesn’t mind being approached by people who are misinformed, as it gives them an opportunity to set the record straight. It has proven to be more challenging to find a way forward with movie studios and other content creators that are aware of Kodi’s position.

These movie industry representatives sometimes ask Kodi to remove third-party repo installs and block certain pirate add-ons. However, according to XBMC Foundation’s Project lead Martijn Kaijser, this isn’t the direction Kodi wants to go in.

“Our view on this is that [removing code] would not help a bit, because the code is open-source and others can easily revert it. Blocking add-ons won’t help since they would instantly change the addon and the block would be in vain,” Kaijser tells us.

The Kodi team feels that pirates are leeching off their infrastructure and put the entire community at risk. But, instead of taking a repressive approach they would like to see more legal content providers join their platform. With an audience of millions of users, there is a lot of untapped potential on a platform that’s rapidly growing.

To facilitate this process, the media player is currently considering whether to add support for DRM so that content providers can offer their videos in a protected environment. While some users may cringe at the thought, Kodi believes it’ll help to get rightsholders on board.

“Our platform has a lot of potential and we are looking into attracting more legal and official content providers. Additionally, we’re looking into adding low-level DRM that would at least make it more feasible to gain trust from certain providers,” Kaijser tells TorrentFreak.

Kodi addons

Although Kodi does go after sellers of pirate boxes, Betzen personally doesn’t believe that this is the answer. The best way to deal with the piracy issue is to offer more legal content through official add-ons.

“We’d like to actually work with content providers to have official add-ons in our network. That’s much easier to do when we are proactively attempting to help them to fight copyright infringement,” Betzen says.

There are already plenty of legal uses for Kodi, including the DVR system, support for legal sports streaming, and a variety of add-ons such as Crunchyroll, HDHomeRun, Plex and Twitch. However, getting some major content providers on board has proven to be quite a challenge thus far.

Kaijser notes that rightsholders have been very reserved thus far. He tried to convince content providers to offer official add-ons, or even turn some community made ones into official ones, but hasn’t had much success.

In a way, the repeated piracy discussions and news items are both a blessing and a curse for Kodi. They help to grow the platform at a rate most competitors could only dream of, while at the same time keeping rightsholders at bay. Time will tell if Kodi can turn this around.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

With BitTorrent more than a decade and a half old, it’s one of the most enduring P2P protocols around. It hasn’t been developed much in recent years but there are people out there hoping to take it to the next level.

Much effort has been expended trying to completely decentralize the system. DHT and PEX, for example, were great contributions but the reliance on centralized websites (such as The Pirate Bay) persists.

That particular problem intrigues Bora, a programmer from Istanbul, Turkey, who informs TF that having a less centralized system would be beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole.

“All the legal action taken against the community has always targeted the points of centralization, as they were the weakest points in the whole mesh,” Bora says.

“In the beginning, trackers were required to facilitate the traffic between peers, but then we ditched them once more and more clients supported the distributed hash table (DHT). We eventually got rid of .torrent files as well [in favor of magnet links], which in turn allowed people to download the whole sum of The Pirate Bay in a hundred megabytes.”

In an effort to try and edge closer to the goal of complete decentralization, Bora has been working on a project called magnetico (small ‘m’), which aims to “unplug” conventional torrent sites altogether. Like the recently defunct torrent site BTDigg and the more recent AlphaReign, Bora’s software uses BitTorrent’s DHT to find content and those all-important peers.

However, where magentico differs from the two examples above is that the indexes it creates can be completely private. It effectively acts as a personal torrent search engine that a user can install on a machine under his or her control.

“magnetico is a collection of programs called magneticod (magnetico daemon) and magneticow (magnetico web),” Bora explains.

“magneticod runs in the background and ‘trawls’ the DHT network to discover info hashes and then fetches torrent metadata from the peers (most importantly, the title and the file list). magneticow is a lightweight web interface for users to search and view the discovered torrents.”

For those interested in some brief technical details, here’s how it works.

“The magneticod module [accesses the DHT] and creates a dummy BitTorrent peer to fetch the metadata from the announced peer, and saves it in a database which you can later search and view,” Bora says.

“As info hashes are the SHA-1 hashes of the torrent metadata, we can be sure of the validity of the metadata we got.”

While operation is simple (Bora says that both modules work without user intervention), the software is in its early stages of development so could be affected by bugs. One known issue is that at times, magneticod can be a bit of a resource hog so may need be restarted.

“I am hoping to address all these issues in the next releases, after collecting useful feedback from the community,” Bora says.

In the meantime, Bora hopes that BEP 51 (a BitTorrent Enhancement Proposal concerning DHT) will come to fruition.

“I would consider myself as having succeeded if major client developers decided to push for BEP 51 and if we together make BitTorrent truly decentralised right in the protocol, rather than resorting back to the brute force solutions,” he concludes.

While magnetico is not for the absolute novice, Bora believes that since its strictly written in Python 3, it’s relatively easy to get going with his detailed instructions.

The magnetico project page can be found here (Github)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Well over five years have passed since Megaupload was shutdown and it’s still unclear how the criminal proceedings will unfold.

A few weeks ago the New Zealand High Court ruled that Kim Dotcom and his former colleagues can be extradited to the US. Not on copyright grounds, but for conspiracy to defraud.

Following the ruling Dotcom quickly announced that he would take the matter to the Court of Appeal, which will prolong the case for several months at least.

While all parties await the outcome of this appeal, the criminal case in the United States remains pending. The same goes for the civil cases launched by the MPAA and RIAA in 2014.

Since the civil cases may influence the criminal proceedings, Megaupload’s legal team previously managed to put these cases on hold, and this week another extension was granted.

Previously there were concerns that the long delays could result in the destruction of evidence, as some of Megaupload’s hard drives were starting to fail. However, after the parties agreed on a solution to back-up and restore the files, this is no longer an issue.

“With the preservation order now in place, Defendant Megaupload hereby moves the Court to enter the attached proposed order, continuing the stay in this case for an additional six months, subject to the terms and conditions stated in the proposed order,” the company wrote in the motion to stay.

On Thursday U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady granted Megaupload’s request to stay both lawsuits until October this year, barring any new developments. The music and movie companies didn’t oppose the motion.

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The order of U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady is available here (pdf). A copy of Megaupload’s request can be found here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

While the site doesn’t get a lot of press in the West, Russia’s RuTracker is one of the biggest torrent sites on the planet.

It’s easily one of the top ten most popular torrent sites online and indexes a massive range of local and international content. Those with Google translate and a modicum of patience report a treasure trove of material.

The situation with RuTracker is somewhat curious. While it is regularly visited by users from a range of countries, the majority of its user base comes from the Russian Federation. However, after drawing the ire of copyright holders, the site is blocked by all local ISPs, a situation that will persist forever.

This so-called “eternal” block was put in place last year and was expected to do the site serious damage. But according to the site’s operators, they’re doing just fine. In fact, not a great deal has changed.

Speaking with local news outlet Apparat, a RuTracker representative confirmed that while attendances have dropped a little, there has been no change at all in the numbers of files being downloaded.

“According to our statistics the number of downloaded torrents has not changed. Every day more than a million torrents are downloaded from Rutracker. We had the same number before the block,” the source reveals.

“The load on our trackers has fallen by no more than 10%. In this case, when we say tracker, we mean the service address [announce URL], where the BitTorrent client recalls the list of peers.”

While the blockades have failed to impact levels of infringement, they have managed to reduce the volumes of traffic reaching the site. Interestingly, RuTracker believes that the kind of device used to access the platform has played a role in whether a user has been able to easily bypass the blocks.

“Most of all, blocking has affected the users of mobile devices. With these it is slightly more difficult to configure a bypass than on a desktop computer,” the rep says.

“Therefore, those users who came to the forum from mobile devices just to talk – and there are so many of them – are faced with problems. For those who used the forum from ordinary computers, the block delivered a minimum of inconveniences: there, a bypass is configured in just two clicks.”

As previously reported, the court-ordered blocking of RuTracker prompted the site to break off cooperation with all copyright holders. The way the site viewed it, why take content down when the punishment for not doing so has already been issued by the court?

“For more than seven years, we had not a single problem with any major vendor, but we were blocked because of the songs of one local rapper, who at the same time put out his songs for public access on social networks. The reason was purely formal, and the decision was political,” the rep explains.

Freed from having to remove content every day, the site is now far more happy doing nothing. In fact, it says that life is now much easier, since all the time and resources spent on taking things down can now be deployed elsewhere. Not to say that the site has a small staff though.

Currently the site has five employees, including programmers and systems administrators, who reportedly earn a salary for their work. On top the site has several volunteer forum administrators and a massive team of moderators, numbering 200 in all.

But as they have done for many years, the site’s operators say they will continue to remain anonymous while earning enough from advertising to balance the books. There are no big profits to report and there will be no Pirate Bay-style posturing.

“We are not a political organization, we do not put forward any demands, we do not call or agitate anything. Deanonymization will not bring any advantages, instead we will receive increased attention from the marginalized, from scammers, and state groups too.”

The site’s operators say they are not against cooperation as long as its based on mutual understanding and a constructive approach. But they weren’t getting that in Russia, it seems, so they’ve skipped out of reach instead.

“We are both physically and legally outside the borders of this wonderful country,” they conclude.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

For several years PayPal has been trying to limit how much business it does with sites and services linked to copyright infringement.

The payment provider previously banned several BitTorrent sites, Usenet providers and file-hosting services to avoid any associations with piracy.

The disconnections are often the result of complaints from copyright holders who want to limit the financial resources of these platforms. In addition, the same companies are also interested in finding out who the operators are.

This puts PayPal in a more tricky position. Handing over personal details of clients is not something most financial companies would do voluntarily. In Germany, this prompted Sony Music to take the matter to court.

This week, the Hamburg District Court ruled that PayPal must hand over the information they have on the operator of an unnamed pirate site. In this case, Luxemburg’s banking secrecy provisions do not shield the website operator.

Internet and copyright lawyer Clemens Rasch, whose law firm handled the case, is happy with the outcome. He says that the ruling allows music producers, film companies and other copyright holders to identify pirates more easily, something they can use to enforce their rights.

“The decision makes it easier to identify offenders and make them liable,” the lawyer comments. The present ruling sets a precedent that could also be applied to other pirates and payment providers.

“According to the ‘follow-the-money’ approach, PayPal and any other payment service, including credit card providers, are obliged to provide information in the event of an infringement. This is the case, for example, if the web server on which the infringements occur is financed through the payment service,” Rasch adds.

In recent years copyright holders have started to rely more heavily on this “follow-the-money” approach. One of the goals is to dry up the resources of alleged copyright infringers. With the German ruling, they now have an ulterior motive to go after sites’ payment providers, at least in Germany.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.