The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), an anti-piracy outfit in the United Kingdom, seems to be hell bent on scaring off anyone who sets their eyes on a pirate Kodi add-on. After the standoff with sellers of pirate boxes and add-on dev teams, now the trade organization is putting streaming users on notices as well.
Admittedly it is a scary proposition regardless of the intention behind the move. But then, we all know that turning threatening talks into reality is a different ball game altogether.
For the uninitiated, Kodi has been at the center of the controversy for awhile now. While Kodi, in itself, is perfectly legal, a significant proportion of users uses it in conjunction with third-party add-ons that fetch copyright infringing content.
FACT’s goal is to stop this trend by initiating legal actions. The organization has already waged the war against sellers of Kodi devices with pre-loaded piracy-promoting add-ons, as well as, those who develop illegal add-ons.
Having achieved partial success in those crackdown missions, FACT now aims to target users of pirate add-ons as well.
“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,” FACT’s chief executive Kieron Sharp told the Independent.
“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,” Sharp noted.
To what extent FACT succeeds in convicting violators remains interesting to see. Note that users buy a device that can access both legal and illegal content. Because a receipt doesn’t include any proof of intent, it is extremely difficult to go legal on buyers of Kodi devices with pirate add-ons. Even if there was a proof of intent, it would still be nearly impossible to prove that a user streamed specific copyright infringing content.