Kodi, despite being a simple multimedia player, is commonly associated with piracy for allowing addons to view pirated content in streaming, either live or delayed. Such is the persecution suffered by the project that they have sued GitHub because of the program.
The developers of Kodi are safe from lawsuits since they do not carry out any activity related to piracy. It is as if they denounced the creators of VLC for facilitating piracy. However, the creators of addons for Kodi do face the clutches of the industry, since those addons do link to or allow you to find or access content subject to copyright.
GitHub allows Kodi pirate addon creators to host their content
An addon maker, whose alias is Blamo, received legal threats in 2018 from the MPA (Motion Picture Association), MPA-Canada, Amazon, and Netflix a lawsuit. However, nothing else happened, but a lawsuit was filed against GitHub in Canada for hosting the addon.
Blamo did not appear at the initial trial against him and was sentenced in his absence on January 15, 2019, but he was ruled against him for having distributed or promoted Kodi addons that infringe copyright. The repository had its same name (Blamo), and the name of the infringing addon was Chocolate Salty Balls.
The case did not stop there, and it is that Blamo continues to operate on his GitHub account (github.com/MrBlamo6969) with complete normality since it continues to “store and distribute Kodi addons and their repository there; the same ones that the judge has already ruled were infringing copyright ”. The MPA asserts that this is resistance to authority.
Therefore, the MPA has asked GitHub to immediately suspend the account to preserve the rights of its clients. However, GitHub has refused to remove the account, although it has removed the two URLs listed in the MPA lawsuit that contained content specifically detailed as illegal by the Federal Court of Canada. Thus, we do not know if this will be the last episode of this legal battle, where the only option that the MPA has to sue GitHub, something that is quite complicated for them to do.
MPA has had GitHub remove the Popcorn Time repository
This week it has also been learned that the MPA has suggested that GitHub could be accused of piracy for hosting the code for the popular torrent movie and series app Popcorn Time. This application is directly related to piracy, and therefore the MPA is taking all possible measures to restrict its availability.
In the lawsuit, there are two URLs: one to the Popcorn Time PC application repository, and one related to its API. In this case, GitHub has listened to the requests of the MPA and has removed both repositories, and it is very unlikely that it will allow their restoration.
