It has been a while since we released 17.3 release which fixed several issues. Now the time has come to do another named 17.4 where we tackled several more issues that were identified. Although we already moved on with development towards v18 we do take the time to fix issues for the current release when we can. We recommend every one to upgrade to this version once it’s available for their platform to have the best experience possible. If you want to know what has changed you can browse the list below.

Fixes done in this release:

• Potentially fix crashing on Windows due to an issue in Python
• Potentially fix crashing on Windows when enabling zeroconf
• Fix sporadic crash on Windows when installing or updating add-ons 
• Fix issue for users with reverse proxies attempting to forward websockets.
• Fix possible issue if Linux distro uses system ffmpeg and cause black screen with 10-bit H.265
• Properly throttle scraping music information online to prevent overloading the provider
• Fix native keyboard on iOS 11
• Fix potential crash on Android O loading App icons
• Fix non showing Kodi banner on Android O
• Fix potential crash on Android with certain keymaps
• Fix wrong detection of VP6 and VP8 videocodec on Android
• Update FFmpeg to 3.1.9
• Set hard requirement to use FFmpeg 3.1.x only
• Fix for Hangup when viewing recording and pressing next/previous
• Fix merged scraped album type and label correctly with that derived from tags from music files
• Fix possible crash on Linux when using ALSA
• Save skin settings immediatly after they have changed instead of only on shutdown

What else is new?

In the bugfix releases we never include any new features. They are as feature complete as the initial version with the difference is they contain stability and usability fixes. If you are curious you can read up on all the v17 changes here: Kodi v17.0 “Krypton”

Where can I download Kodi?

As alway you can find the official builds on our download page. Then click on the platform of choice and select the build you need. You can install these build just on top of your current Kodi installation without doing a reinstall or cleanup as we do a full migration if needed. All you add-ons or installed skin will keep working.

Apparel, donations or getting involved

Getting involved is quite easy. We encourage you to report problems with these builds on our forum first and after that, if asked, submit bugs on Trac (following this guide: How to submit a bug report). Do note that we need detailed information so we can investigate the issue. We also appreciate providing support in our Forums where you can. You can of course also follow or help promote Kodi on all available social networks. Read more on the get involved page. We are always happy to receive a donation by which you show your support and appreciation, and t-shirts and Raspberry Pi cases may still be found on the sidebar for purchase. All donations and other income goes towards the XBMC foundation and are typically used for travel to attend conferences, any necessary paperwork and legal fees, purchasing necessary hardware and licenses for developers and hopefully the yearly XBMC Foundation Developers Conference.

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This weekend, the undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. will go head-to-head with UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

The fight is not just about prestige, but also about money. Some predict that the unusual matchup could pull in a staggering one billion dollars.

A significant portion of this will go to each of the fighters, but rightsholders such as Showtime benefit as well.

People who want to stream the event live over the Internet will have to cough up between $89.95 and $99.99. This will generate millions of dollars in revenue but the numbers would be even higher if it wasn’t so easy to stream the fight through pirate sites.

This is why Showtime took some of the most brazen pirate sites to court last week, demanding an injunction to stop the pirated streams before they even start. In its complaint, the cable TV provider listed 44 domain names which advertise the fight, urging the court to shut them down pre-emptively.

A few of the 44 targeted (sub)domains.

After reviewing the application, United States District Judge André Birotte Jr. approved the preliminary injunction, which forbids the site’s operators from offering infringing streams. The injunction stays in place until August 28, two days after the event.

While the order is a clear win for Showtime, it’s unclear how effective it will be. The sites in question are all believed to be connected to LiveStreamHDQ and its alleged operator “Kopa Mayweather,” who Showtime have battled before.

At the time of writing, the sites are all still online, although the language appears to have changed. Many now have articles explaining how the fight can be watched legally. Whether it remains that way has to be seen.

Updated ‘pirate’ site

Interestingly, the injunction doesn’t mention any domain name registrars or registries. When Showtime applied for similar measures in the past, the company specifically asked to take control of domain names, so these couldn’t be used for any infringing activity.

That said, the current order applies to the defendants and any others who are “in active concert or participation” with them, so this might be enough for domain registrars and other parties to take appropriate action.

Showtime also has the possibility to request updates to the injunction, if needed, but with only a few days to go this has to happen swiftly.

As mentioned earlier, this is not the first time that Showtime has gone after alleged pirates before they get a chance to commit an offense. The company launched similar cases for the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao and Mayweather vs. Berto matchups in 2015.

While these efforts were successful in taking a few pirate sites down, there were plenty of unauthorized streams available when the events started. This time it’s not likely to be any different. With hundreds of live streaming sites and tools out there, piracy will remain undefeated.

—

A copy of the preliminary injunction is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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On June 2, a collection of Canadian telecoms giants including Bell Canada, Bell ExpressVu, Bell Media, Videotron, Groupe TVA, Rogers Communications and Rogers Media, filed a complaint in Federal Court against Montreal resident Adam Lackman, the man behind TVAddons.

They claimed that by developing, hosting, distributing or promoting Kodi add-ons, Lackman infringed their copyrights.

On June 9 the Federal Court handed down an interim injunction against Lackman which restrained him from various activities in respect of TVAddons. The process took place ex parte, meaning in secret, without Lackman being able to mount a defense.

The plaintiffs were also granted an Anton Piller order, a civil search warrant that granted access to Lackman’s premises and allowed him to be interrogated.

As previously reported, the plaintiffs abused the process and only later did a court recognize that the search was designed as both a fishing exercise and a means to take down TVAddons, in advance of any trial on the merits of the case.

In the meantime, with the process grinding through an early appeal, the plaintiffs’ aim of destroying TVAddons has been at least partially achieved. After prolonged downtime, Lackman recently brought the site back under a new URL, TVAddons.co. However, he informs TF that serious damage has been done to a project that previously enjoyed great momentum.

“Google is the most popular site on the internet. If Google was down for a day, you’d check back tomorrow. If it was down for a week, you’d check back a week later. If it was down for a month, maybe you’d try once in a while,” Lackman says.

“However, if Google was down for more than six months, would you return in a year from now? Probably not. And that’s Google, not a small community site like TVAddons.”

Some people are coming back to the site now, but in nowhere near the volumes it previously enjoyed. Here’s a traffic analysis for a typical day at TVAddons.ag before the takedown.

TVAddons.ag daily traffic, before the takedown

And here is how the traffic for TVAddons.co looked a few days ago, a little two weeks after its revival and ten weeks after the initial takedown.

<TVAddons.co traffic, after bringing the site back

Part of the problem is not being able to get in touch with former users. In addition to taking control of TVAddons’ domains, the legal process also deprived the site of its social media accounts.

For example, TVAddons’ original Twitter account is now dormant. It still has 141K followers but with its passwords in the hands of lawyers, Lackman has been forced to open a new account, TVAddonsco. However, he’s only been able to attract just over 8,000 followers.

Facebook tells a similar story. With no access to the old account (which had 174,229 likes), the new account facebook.com/tvaddonsco is stalling at around 1,600. The situations on YouTube and Instagram are just as bleak.

“They’ve completely muzzled us, there was never anything questionable on our social media, seizing it without actually winning a lawsuit against us is nothing less than censorship,” Lackman says.

“Since we never required user registration, we don’t have the ability to reach the majority of our users without having access to our old social media accounts and notification system, which doesn’t work without our domain name being active.”

Also seized were TVaddons’ Feedburner account, which was used to manage the site’s 100,000 RSS feed subscribers.

“It was in the same account as Google+ and YouTube so we lost that too. We could have easily used it to forward our RSS feed and keep all the subscribers otherwise,” Lackman adds.

This has left TVAddons having to do its best to spread the details of its new locations via social media and a contest that has thus far gained more than 87,000 entries and may be helping things along.

While it’s now common knowledge that many TVAddons-related domains and accounts were seized following the search, Lackman now reveals that other non-connected projects were affected too. Included were the social media pages of several unrelated businesses, the domain name of a hosting website that was around seven years old, and an entirely legal “cord-cutting” information resource.

“Since the cord-cutting phenomenon conflicts with their business interests, seizing that specific social media page effectively destroyed their direct competition,” Lackman says.

“The plaintiffs are trying to destroy their competition rather than innovating. TVAddons provided a lot of legitimate competition for them in terms of content for cordcutters, they’re trying to keep a grasp on the market at any cost.

“Their failure at innovating can be immediately demonstrated by the fact that the NFL recently canceled all broadcast contracts with Canadian TV operators, in favor of DAZN, a new legal sports streaming service that charges half the price they did, with way more content than their sports packages ever offered.”

But despite the setbacks, Lackman appears determined to continue not only with the resurrected TVAddons, but also the legal fight against the Canadian broadcasting giants intent on his destruction.

At the time of writing the site’s fundraiser has generated more than $27,000 in 15 days but TF understands that this might only be 5 to 10 percent of the final sum required when all bills are counted. It’s hoped that new methods of donating and assistance from friendly website operators might give the campaign an additional boost but in the meantime, Lackman is expressing gratitude for the efforts so far.

I am honoured to see so much support from so many people whom I have never met. Thank you and G-d Bless you all.

— Adam Lackman (@adamlackman) August 4, 2017

It’s hard to say whether TVAddons will once again reach the heights achieved at its peak but after taking years to build up a following, the odds are certainly stacked against it.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is one of the many companies trying to turn Internet piracy into profit. The company has a somewhat novel approach but has difficulty balancing the books.

Essentially, Rightscorp operates like other so-called copyright-trolling operations, in that it monitors alleged offenders on BitTorrent networks, tracks them to their ISPs, then attempts to extract a cash settlement. Rightscorp does this by sending DMCA notices with settlement agreements attached, in the hope that at-this-point-anonymous Internet users break cover in panic. This can lead to a $20 or $30 ‘fine’ or in some cases dozens of multiples of that.

But despite settling hundreds of thousands of these cases, profit has thus far proven elusive, with the company hemorrhaging millions in losses. The company has just filed its results for the first half of 2017 and they contain more bad news.

In the six months ended June 2017, revenues obtained from copyright settlements reached just $138,514, that’s 35% down on the $214,326 generated in the same period last year. However, the company did manage to book $148,332 in “consulting revenue” in the first half of this year, a business area that generated no revenue in 2016.

Overall then, total revenue for the six month period was $286,846 – up from $214,326 last year. While that’s a better picture in its own right, Rightscorp has a lot of costs attached to its business.

After paying out $69,257 to copyright holders and absorbing $1,190,696 in general and administrative costs, among other things, the company’s total operating expenses topped out at $1,296,127 for the first six months of the year.

To make a long story short, the company made a net loss of $1,068,422, which was more than the $995,265 loss it made last year and despite improved revenues. The company ended June with just $1,725 in cash.

“These factors raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern within one year after the date that the financial statements are issued,” the company’s latest statement reads.

This hanging-by-a-thread narrative has followed Rightscorp for the past few years but there’s information in the latest accounts which indicates how bad things were at the start of the year.

In January 2016, Rightscorp and several copyright holders, including Hollywood studio Warner Bros, agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over intimidating robo-calls that were made to alleged infringers. The defendants agreed to set aside $450,000 to cover the costs, and it appears that Rightscorp was liable for at least $200,000 of that.

Rightscorp hasn’t exactly been flush with cash, so it was interesting to read that its main consumer piracy settlement client, music publisher BMG, actually stepped in to pay off the class-action settlement.

“At December 31, 2016, the Company had accrued $200,000 related to the settlement of a class action complaint. On January 7, 2017, BMG Rights Management (US) LLC (“BMG”) advanced the Company $200,000, which was used to pay off the settlement. The advance from BMG is to be applied to future billings from the Company to BMG for consulting services,” Rightscorp’s filing reads.

With Rightscorp’s future BMG revenue now being gobbled up by what appears to be loan repayments, it becomes difficult to see how the anti-piracy outfit can make enough money to pay off the $200,000 debt. However, its filing notes that on July 21, 2017, the company issued “an aggregate of 10,000,000 shares of common stock to an investor for a purchase price of $200,000.” While that amount matches the BMG debt, the filing doesn’t reveal who the investor is.

The filing also reveals that on July 31, Rightscorp entered into two agreements to provide services “to a holder of multiple copyrights.” The copyright holder isn’t named, but the deal reveals that it’s in Rightscorp’s best interests to get immediate payment from people to whom it sends cash settlement demands.

“[Rightscorp] will receive 50% of all gross proceeds of any settlement revenue received by the Client from pre-lawsuit ‘advisory notices,’ and 37.5% of all gross proceeds received by the Client from ‘final warning’ notices sent immediately prior to a lawsuit,” the filing notes.

Also of interest is that Rightscorp has offered not to work with any of the copyright holders’ direct competitors, providing certain thresholds are met – $10,000 revenue in the first month to $100,000 after 12 months. But there’s more to the deal.

Rightscorp will also provide a number of services to this client including detecting and verifying copyright works on P2P networks, providing information about infringers, plus reporting, litigation support, and copyright protection advisory services.

For this, Rightscorp will earn $10,000 for the first three months, rising to $85,000 per month after 16 months, valuable revenue for a company fighting for its life.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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