The Kodi service says goodbye to its TVAddons service. The creator of the well-known repository has been sentenced to pay a millionaire fine for copyright issues and, after this, it has closed its doors forever.
Kodi is a free and open source application maintained by volunteers and donations. For its part, TVAddons broadcast series such as ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Prison Break’, ‘The Big Bang Theory’, ‘America’s Got Talent’, ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians’ and dozens more, which according to the lawsuit that has brought down this repository, violates copyright because “it developed, hosted, distributed or promoted infringing Kodi add-ons.”
Almost 5 years of legal battle
The controversy is not new, it must be said. Already in 2017 we saw how Kodi had gradually become the objective of the audiovisual industry. Some of the third-party plugins used by the popular multimedia content manager had been disappearing after being accused of copyright infringement. And even TVAddons disappeared for a while.
In the same 2017, Bell Canada, TVA, Videotron and Rogers joined in a lawsuit against the operator of TVAddons, the largest repository of Kodi addons, for copyright issues. After several years of legal battle, the founder of TVAddons has admitted responsibility for him and has agreed to pay $19.5 million in damages.
Adam Lackman, its creator, has now declared guilty as charged piracy, and has agreed to a $19.5 million penalty for copyright infringement with the courts.
On June 9, 2017, a Federal Court in the United States issued an injunction against Lackman prohibiting him from carrying out various activities in relation to TVAddons. And to this, Lackman was unable to present a defense. The plaintiffs were also granted a civil search warrant allowing them access to Lackman’s home without notice.
TVAddons later came back with a new domain name, but the damage had been done. After a resurgence in 2019, the site’s traffic was steadily declining. Until a couple of weeks ago, the website was still operational.
In a letter dated February 18, 2022, the plaintiff companies and Lackman told the Federal Court that they had resolved their differences by agreeing to a consent judgment. Lackman admits to having offered to the public television programs owned by of the plaintiffs, which goes against the Copyright Law, according to the signed agreement.
Kodi is a legal service
Although the name of Kodi is key in the news, since it is the program used to access these add-ons that justice considers illegal, the truth is that it is a mere content player that by default does not include add-ons or content that infringes copyright in Spain and other countries. When you download it, Kodi includes suggested add-ons in its official repository such as Pluto TV or YouTube.and these have never been a problem for the app developers.
What justice pursues is who hosts and distributes the content that is seen through Kodi, in the same way that a few years ago it was not persecuted usually clients to download torrents, and yes to who provided and hosted the copyrighted content. Kodi always gets caught up in controversies like this, but there is nothing illegal about its code.
Even without using add-ons, many users use Kodi or VLC to play IPTV lists with copyrighted contentand even in that case, they are mere players, since it is the user who has acquired the m3u file that is displayed in these programs, but their developers have no responsibility.