IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, presents itself as the “voice of the recording industry worldwide.” The organization represents 1,300 record companies globally including the biggest labels in the industry.

IFPI’s annual Music Consumer Insight Report delves into the way music is consumed by 16 to 64-year-olds, particularly in the ever-expanding digital marketplace. Carried out by AudienceNet between April and May 2018 and covering twenty territories accounting for 91.3% of global revenues, the research aims to understand how consumers engage with both licensed and unlicensed content.

The report kicks off with the headline figure that 86% of consumers are now listening to music through on-demand streaming, with a solid 50% of 16 to 24-year-olds indicating a preference for streaming if there were only one way to listen to music. According to the research, 75% of consumers now use smartphones to access music.

But while millions of global consumers are now choosing licensed services for their musical fix, large numbers are still obtaining content from unlicensed sources. The report finds that almost four out of ten consumers (38%) still obtain their content using methods that infringe copyright.

In the early 2000s, the unchallenged kings of illegal music supply were the P2P networks dominated by the likes of Kazaa and LimeWire, with BitTorrent and file-hosting sites entering the party later but grabbing a huge slice of the cake. Now, however, it is largely legal services that are providing the source material for the ‘pirate’ market.

IFPI is clear: so-called ‘stream-ripping’ is now the most-used form of obtaining music online illegally, with 32% of all consumers downloading music this way. While users can head off to legal services and stream ad-supported content at will, stream-rippers use various tools to download the music instead, meaning that they don’t have to revisit to listen to the same content.

“Stream-ripping users are more likely to say that they rip music so they have music to listen to offline. This means they can avoid paying for a premium streaming subscription,” IFPI notes.

With a nod to successful action against sites including YouTube-MP3 and others, IFPI notes that the stream-ripping issue isn’t going away.

“Record companies are taking action globally against stream ripping sites that undermine legitimate services and pay no money to those investing in and creating the music. Despite some successes, the problem persists,” its report reads.

In its latest submission to the USTR, the RIAA highlighted a number of key overseas stream-ripping offenders, including Flvto.biz and 2conv.com (which are currently being sued), plus Mp3juices.cc, Convert2mp3.net, Ytmp3.cc, plus several others.

Given that YouTube is now a major source of both licensed and unlicensed music (and is an unwitting key supplier of source material to the ‘pirate’ market), it’s no surprise that the so-called ‘Value Gap’ and related issues are highlighted in IFPI’s research.

“[U]ser upload services are not returning fair value to the music community,” IFPI notes, adding that 35% of consumers say that a main reason for them not subscribing to a paid music service is because everything they need is already available for free on YouTube.

While the music industry is determined to change legislation in order to find a way out of the ‘Value Gap’ conundrum (particularly via the now infamous Article 13 in the EU), it has other copyright-related problems to deal with too.

According to the study, almost a quarter (23%) of global consumers obtain unlicensed music through either cyberlocker sites or P2P systems such as BitTorrent.

Sites specializing in both delivery systems were recently reported to the USTR including Russian giant Rapidgator, Zippyshare, and Turbobit, plus torrent indexes ThePirate Bay, Torrentz2, RARBG, and 1337x.

Piracy: still going strong

Finally, IFPI’s report notes that 17% of all consumers use search engines to find infringing content. Given that billions of takedown notices have been sent to Google to remove links to pirate music from search results, this seems like a pretty high figure. Anecdotal evidence online suggests that Google, in particular, is no longer the trove of unlicensed content links it once was.

However, with initiatives like site downranking now in place at Google, it seems likely that key sources of unlicensed content will continue their trip to the outlying pages of search engine indexes, which could encourage users to test out alternatives such as DuckDuckGo. IFPI, of course, will hope the trend switches towards licensed services instead.

The full Music Consumer Insight Report 2018 can be downloaded here (pdf)

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With file-sharers manually acquiring increasingly large libraries of content, several years ago it became clear that software to automate the process would prove popular with the masses.

One such tool was Sick Beard, a PVR-like piece of software that was able to utilize Usenet providers, indexers, and TheTVDB to identify airing dates for TV shows and automatically download whenever they became available online. It would then add the content to a user’s library ready for viewing.

Like many successful open projects, Sick Beard later found itself ‘forked’, with developers breathing life into SickRage, a GNU General Public Licensed tool that took Sick Beard’s dreams and ran with them. With improved Usenet and torrent support plus a whole raft of new features, SickRage gained an impressive following.

SickRage in action

Unfortunately, however, SickRage began to suffer problems common to many projects where not every developer is an agreement on every point of action. This led to fragmentation, with devs moving to work on other similar projects. One of those who departed was a dev known as Echel0n, who started up his own SickRage variant operating from SickRage.ca.

In July 2017, things appeared to boil over when Echel0n (later self-identified as ‘Justin Tabish’) filed a DMCA complaint with Github, claiming copyright over the SickRage code.

“SiCKRAGE and the original code has not been provided or its use authorized, this is a violation of my copyright. I have a good faith belief the distribution of SiCKRAGE includes content of which the distribution is not authorized by the copyright owner, it’s [sic] agent, or the law,” the complaint reads.

Just days later, SickRage fought back, filing a counter-notice with Github. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the various contributors to long-standing open projects, the counter-notice points out a number of issues with the original DMCA notice.

Disputing all of its claims, the counter-notice states that the original SickRage copyright holder (@midgetspy) endorsed adding his name to the license and adding the counter-notice filer’s name “underneath his as credit for later contributions as per convention.” It also states that ‘Echel0n’ has no standing to make a complaint.

“As such, all other claims are disputed for this DMCA. We are in compliance with all applicable law to the best of our knowledge. Very little if any code is shared among these forks, however if complainant would like a prior credit added that would be amenable,” the notice adds.

With that, Gihub reinstated the project and for some time it appeared that an uneasy peace had broken out. It now transpires, however, that Echel0n (Tabish) was just getting warmed up.

As the image below shows, in September the developer registered the trademark ‘SickRage’ in the US with the United States Trademark and Patents Office (USPTO).

SickRage trademark filing

Armed with this piece of paper, Justin Tabish fired off a complaint to developer Dustyn Gibson (aka ‘miigotu‘) of the SickRage project, warning him to cease and desist using the SickRage trademark, even though it doesn’t appear to have been awarded yet.

Cease and Desist

Tabish also wrote to Github, demanding that the site transfer ownership of the SickRage repository to him.

“I’d like to report a case of trademark infringement and am requesting transfer of ownership for the following organization to my control so that I can remedy the situation, the organization is https://github.com/sickrage and is owned/controlled by username Miigotu, user’s profile is located at https://github.com/miigotu,” he told the company.

“This repo also has a website located at https://sickrage.github.io. This user/repo is a ex-team member of mine that I let go awhile back, they and others decided to open a repo on you’re servers under the exact same name of my company and project causing confusion and misleading members, as you can see in the title of the repo they have placed ‘The new home of the SickRage community’ which leads others to think there was some sort of change of ownership.”

Describing the effort as a “hostile takeover” attempt, ‘miigotu’ posted a note to the official Github account promising to fight every inch of the way.

“I will have to fight this again, he is claiming his ‘company’ owns a trademark to the name SickRage. This is a joke and I will fight it tooth and nail,” miigotu writes.

“Just another attempt by the drug addict to try and claim he owns the work that we all did on this project. He abandoned the project and we made it what it is. Then he popped up 2 years later and removed the entire team. If I have to take him to court, that will happen.”

There’s now a pretty huge argument taking place on Github as to who is right and wrong, and who is infringing on various rights. It’s a minefield of opinions that’s best read directly to be understood. Needless to say, it’s very messy indeed.

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

Aside from Andrus Nomm’s plea deal, progress in the criminal proceedings has been slow.

Kim Dotcom and his former colleagues are currently fighting a legal battle in New Zealand to prevent their extradition to the US, for which the final decision has yet to be issued.

While all parties await the outcome, the criminal case in the United States remains pending. The same goes for the civil cases launched by the MPAA and RIAA in 2014, more than four years ago.

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

This is not the first time that such a request had been made. There have been several extensions already, which caused some issues.

There were previously 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 in place, and there being no other objection, Defendant Megaupload hereby moves the Court to enter the attached proposed order, continuing the stay in this case for an additional six months,” Megaupload’s legal team informed the court this week.

Without any objections from the MPAA and RIAA, U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady swiftly granted Megaupload’s request to stay both lawsuits until April next year.

And so that wait continues…

Order to stay

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When CD copying was all the rage in the late 1990s, many countries started to levy a tax on blank media.

This meant that consumers had to pay an extra fee on every recordable disc, because these can be used to duplicate copyrighted content.

In some countries, this model has expanded to other media, such as hard disks, MP3 players and phones. In Canada, however, this didn’t happen. Despite several attempts in the past, there is no private copying levy on smartphones, tablets or hard disks.

During recent copyright reform discussions, the matter was brought to the forefront once again. But there’s also another copyright compensation issue, one that’s potentially even more controversial.

A proposal from the Screen Composers Guild of Canada (SCGC), put forward during last week’s Government hearings, suggests to simply add a levy on Internet use above 15 gigabytes per month.

The music composers argue that this is warranted because composers miss out on public performance royalties. One of the reasons for this is that online streaming services are not paying as much as terrestrial broadcasters.

The composers SCGC represents are not the big music stars. They are the people who write music for TV-shows and other broadcasts. Increasingly these are also shown on streaming services where the compensation is, apparently, much lower.

“With regard to YouTube, which is owned by the advertising company Alphabet-Google, minuscule revenue distribution is being reported by our members. Royalties from the large streaming services, like Amazon and Netflix, are 50 to 95% lower when compared to those from terrestrial broadcasters,” SCGC writes (pdf).

“Statistics like this indicate that our veteran members will soon have to seek employment elsewhere and young screen-composers will have little hope of sustaining a livelihood,” the guild adds, sounding the alarm bell.

SCGC’s solution to this problem is to make every Canadian pay an extra fee when they use over 15 gigabytes of data per month. This money would then be used to compensate composers and fix the so-called ‘value gap’.

As a result, all Internet users who go over the cap will have to pay more. Even those who don’t watch any of the programs where the music is used.

However, SCGC doesn’t see the problem and believes that 15 gigabytes are enough. People who want to avoid paying can still use email and share photos, they argue. Those who go over the cap are likely streaming not properly compensated videos.

“An ISP subscription levy that would provide a minimum or provide a basic 15 gigabytes of data per Canadian household a month that would be unlevied. Lots of room for households to be able to do Internet transactions, business, share photos, download a few things, emails, no problem,” SCGC notes.

“[W]hen you’re downloading and consuming over 15 gigabytes of data a month, you’re likely streaming Spotify. You’re likely streaming YouTube. You’re likely streaming Netflix. So we think because the FANG companies will not give us access to the numbers that they have, we have to apply a broad-based levy. They’re forcing us to.”

The last comment is telling. The composers guild believes that a levy is the only option because Netflix, YouTube, and others are not paying their fair share.

That sounds like a licensing or rights issue between these services and the authors. Dragging millions of Canadians into this dispute seems questionable, especially when many people have absolutely nothing to do with it.

According to Canadian law professor Michael Geist, who highlighted the issue, it would also result in an unfair double-payment.

“[T]he SCGC proposal would represent double-payment by consumers, who would pay to access the content on services such as Spotify and Netflix and pay for the transmission of the same content with the ill-advised copyright tax on broadband data,” Geist writes.

It’s doubtful that there will be broad support for the proposal among the public. However, proposing to add a levy or tax on Internet use certainly gets people’s attention, which might have been part of the plan.

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We hereby present you the third Beta build of Kodi v18 as we are heading towards the final release. Since we are now in Beta stage our focus will be on solving bugs and possible usability problems. So far it has been proven to be quite solid to use as a daily driver for those who were brave enough to try it out. Of course you should still keep in mind it’s not a final release yet and that on any upgrade a small glitch could happen as we are still doing rework. Once you decide to give it a try it is highly recommended that you create a backup first.

Currently included

A full changelog is nearly impossible to create and in this release article we will only cover the basics. For a more extensive list you can visit our wiki page v18 (Leia) changelog which will be update along the way. From now on all v18 releases will not contain any big new features as we are focussed on bug fixing only.

Most notable fixes to mention in Beta 3:

• Fix slow browsing in library that was a regression added in Beta 2
• Updated button maps for controllers that changed Beta 2
• Improved playback on Android regarding video and DTS-HD audio
• Revert changes for smooth video on Windows that caused issues
• Various other fixes regarding video playback

Of course there are several more changes which are listed on our github repository found here: Beta3 changes.

Make sure to also go through our news sections which contain all past announcements regarding the Leia release and some highlights of what it will contain.

Stability and usability is key

In general the whole stability has been improved quite a lot. The times you still get glitches or occasional crashes haven been reduced due to just ripping out not so well coded parts and replaced with a more structured design and standard. Not that the old code was bad however over time new insights were gained and having newer code standards just make it better. Untangling all parts or components and make them behave better next to each other has been one of the biggest efforts done so far.

Current available skins

Due to changes in how Kodi works skins need to be updated for each release. As of this moment we have the following ones have been update by their developers and are readily available from our repository.

Adnoic, Aeon Nox 5, Andromeda, Black Glass Nova, Chroma, Confluence, fTV, Grid, Mimic, Nebula, Omni, Rapier, Sio2, Xperience1080

More will follow at a later point in time when we approach final release.

Python 2 & 3 compatibility will be enforced

Currently, Kodi includes the Python 2.7 interpreter to run addons written in Python programming language. However, Python 3 was released almost 10 years ago and the matter of implementing the Python 3 interpreter in Kodi has been brought up on the Kodi forum several times. Now, thanks to a successful GSOC 2017 project, we have a working Python 3.6 interpreter for Kodi, and on the latest DevCon 2017 in Prague Team Kodi decided that it’s time to move on and migrate Python addon subsystem to Python 3. There are several reasons for that:

• Python 2 End of Life is planned for 2020.

• Python 3 is mature enough and more and more Python libraries either convert their codebase to Python 3-compatible or drop Python 2 support completely (Django is the most notable example).

• Most current Python books, tutorials and courses are focused on Python 3.

• Python 2 is not actively developed. It receives only security patches while Python 3 gets all the cool new features with every minor version.

However, Python 3 is not backward-compatible with the 2nd version so some transition process is required. Currently the plan is the following:

• Kodi 19 (M*) will be released with Python 3 interpreter for running Python-based addons.

• After the release of Kodi 18 (Leia) only addons that are compatible with both Python 2 and 3 will be accepted to the official addon repository. Also, Python 3-only addons will be accepted to the repositories for Kodi 19 (M*) and above.

• Addon developers are highly encouraged to convert their addons to Python 2/3-compatible so that after the release of Kodi 19 (M*) we will have enough addons that work with the new version.

• Test builds based on Kodi 18 with the Python 3 interpreter will be provided continuously so addon developers can test their addons for compatibility with Python 3. Test builds for Windows are already available for downloading from here and test builds for Ubuntu can be obtained from this PPA.

• One the v18 version has been branched off for final release the nightlies will become Python 3 only while the release builds will still be Python 2.

Writing Python code that is compatible with both 2 and 3 versions is totally possible and the “big” Python world has been doing it for years since the release of Python 3.0. There are a number of tools and best practices developed to simplify this process. Please read this Kodi Wiki article for more information and technical details about the migration process. Also a special Wiki section has been created that will be updated with new information. You can post questions about converting your addon code to Python 3-compatible or share your experience in “Python 3 migration” subforum on the official Kodi forum.

A new main menu item

As some of you have seen a new menu item has appeared on the main menu. We will expand more on what this means in a future article.

The story continues

Although we don’t really have a clear future plan or clear cut goals (except making a great media center) we would welcome any developer who wants to spend time on getting Kodi better in every way. Either improving the core code to newer standards, fixing bugs or implementing a new feature we haven’t thought of. Compared to years ago the code has become better to understand and follow for newcomers to get started. Once we get something written down of certain to reach goals we will certainly share them.

A great improvement has been made on the documentation that explains how to compile and work on the core code for Kodi. We highly recommend to read the article Kodi’s GitHub codebase new face and better documentation.

Release time

Since we now started the Beta cycle a final release will be on the near horizon. When the final release will actually be is yet unknown as it all depends on the stability now more people will start using the v18 builds.

That’s about it for now and we’ll go back at improving this upcoming v18 release. Should you wish to give it a try a new version is readily available each day as well as nightly version. We can certainly recommend trying it out however take in mind that it’s not fully production and living room ready yet (take a backup). So far a guestimate of several tens of thousands users already use it so it can’t be that bad can it. You can get it from the download page clicking on the platform of choice and hitting the “pre release” tab. For Android and Windows we have an easy to use download add-on which you can find in our repository.

Go to the Official download page and choose the platform of choice and you will find these builds under the pre release tab.

If you do appreciate our work feel free to give a small donation so we can continue our effort. Just find the big “Donate” button at the top of the website.

May the force be with you…..

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