XBMC Foundation, the producers of Kodi media player, announced their serious intentions to take legal action against users that violate copyright infringement or piracy laws. The legal action will also be taken against sellers of the product that advertise the app as having add-ons or plug-ins, or such products that fail to deliver.
Kodi is a basic media player application or software that can play songs and videos from any multimedia platform. However, it can also play third party plug-ins. When a user downloads Kodi with plug-ins, they unwittingly think that the add-ons are added by XBMC when this is not the case. These kinds of file sharing, at no cost to users and at no profit for the movie or music producers, make a case for copyright infringement or piracy, Torrent Freak reported.
"Every day a new user shows up on the Kodi forum, totally unaware that the free movies they're watching have been pirated and surprised to discover that Kodi itself isn't providing those movies," Nathan Betzen, president of XBMC and product manager at Kodi, was cited as saying.
Some users are aware of the copyright infringement issues they will face when using Kodi and installing add-ons or plug-ins themselves after buying the software. However, more people are estimated to have been unaware of the producers' noninvolvment in installing these add-ons or plug-ins, reports said.
The cases of piracy worsened recently that developers of the Kodi app threatened to leave XBMC if the management did not do something about the issue, Myce.com also reported. These cases are rampant especially for software bought in online shops such as eBay or Amazon, and not directly from Kodi.
"There have been a wave of sellers who decided to make a quick buck modifying Kodi, installing broken piracy add-ons, advertising that Kodi lets you watch free movies and TV, and then vanishing when the user buys the box and finds out that the add-on they were sold on was a crummy, constantly breaking mess. These sellers are dragging users into the world of piracy without their knowledge and at the same time convincing new users that Kodi is a buggy mess, because they never differentiate Kodi from 3rd party add-ons," Betzen noted.
Back in 2014, Kodi producers already released notifications of copyright infringement incidents to online shops, Torrent Freak reported. eBay, on its part, took down listings of Kodi products as requested by XBMC to fight piracy incidents.
A query from an eBay seller got a response from eBay management, saying that XBMC informs the online shop if a piracy law violation was detected from a specific product listing. The producer then, as a legal trademark, has the right to ask for the listing to be taken down from eBay, reports said.
