Target in 1080p Aka OMI In A Hellcat $50.000.000 Fortune Seized By FBI – Gears TV Shutdown

While the war on IPTV still holds, a new development came out just today. One of the most upcoming vloggers, OMI In A Hellcat, previously known as Target In 1080p just released a video sharing with his audience that he got raided by the FBI. OMI whose real name is Omar, in previous videos has repeatedly stated that he had a $50.000.000 fortune. In his new channel on YouTube he is vlogging his daily activities, mostly buying crazy-expensive stuff for himself, family and friends. This extravagant lifestyle is most probably what made the authorities, the FBI in the specifics, take a closer look at his possessions. In the video which got pretty viral already Omar states that the FBI seized everything: houses, SD Cards, cars, bikes, computers, jewelry, phones, drones. And in the million dollar question “what happened with the FBI?” he goes “It was pretty much IPTV and taxes and shit and hiring the wrong CPA [accountant]. This is really important for you guys, make sure your taxes are paid for” he says. The “taxes and shit” seems to be a reference to pending tax evasion and money laundering charges following a three-year IRS investigation. According to him he didn’t paid taxes for more than two years.

Also in the same video he starts talking about his KODI related activities and most importantly about his IPTV experience. He claims that he has found a loophole by which he could create his IPTV company and restream cable as IPTV. I for first am shocked by the details he gave and confessed on camera. I think that whatever the case is, he should have consulted a lawyer and keep the rest for himself. As he should have done before with his high-end lifestyle. In previous videos he shared that he had long left the IPTV / streaming world but this last video seems to suggest otherwise.

If anything, from what he shared looks like he is still connected to the “grey” area of IPTV companies. And truth be told Gears TV and Reloaded TV, two of the IPTV brands he previously represented are both down as of yesterday. The message you will get when trying to access them is “Down For Maintenance” but by the shocking words of OMI we hear that everything is down and he will take the fall for all the people that are working with him. He also pointed out that he is certain that he will face jail time: “I paid for my channels. I did things the old school way. I used capture cards. I take full responsibility so anybody on my team and shit, I pretty much hope you guys don’t ever go to jail now”.

The video has even more shocking revelations and even a mention of someone being a confidential informant, most probably a member of his team. And while all those details are all public domain by his own intent, I really think I shouldn’t dive into it more. After all these are really serious accusations and whatever happened no life should be ruined. He unfortunately added something very dark which I really hope was a thing of a moment: “I’m gonna go on live….and i’m going to kill myself. I’m gonna go on live, express how I feel and then shoot myself on live.”

In conclusion, seems like this is more a money laundering / tax evasion case than a copyright issue. OMI has also some hosting business for gaming like servers for Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft. And with such a luxurious lifestyle, if you never paid taxes it is certain that you will get trouble from the IRS. I hope everything resolves for all people involved in the best and safest way and of course good luck to OMI himself. But if I may, I would also recommend to him to consult a lawyer and keep matters to himself. It doesn’t worth the views…

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Gears Reloaded: FBI Just Took Everything, Says Pirate IPTV Boss OMI IN A HELLCAT


OMI with custom ‘Reloaded’ bling

It is not uncommon for anti-piracy groups to state that some ‘pirates’ make a lot of money.

However, whenever that is the case, there’s a tendency for most in the piracy world to maintain a low profile.

Take that position, multiply it by a million. You’re now just halfway to the crazy world of YouTube sensation OMI IN A HELLCAT.

Regularly seen on his channel adding yet another supercar to his huge collection (a recent addition was a McLaren 720s Spider), OMI – real name Omar Carrasquillo – is the founder and owner of ‘pirate’ IPTV service Gears Reloaded.

There’s no suggestion that all of OMI’s rumored $50m fortune came from piracy (he reportedly owns real estate, a restaurant, and several other businesses) but it seems highly likely that the Gears Reloaded gig is well and truly over.

Starting early yesterday, users of the Gears Reloaded IPTV service reported rare downtime. The website connected to the service displays a message indicating ‘down for maintenance’ but according to OMI himself, that’s only part of the story.

“This ain’t clickbait. This ain’t fake, this is not fake. This is 100% real,” OMI said in a noticeably subdued live Q&A with his fans a couple of hours ago, streamed from a friend’s house in Philadelphia.

“I’m gonna let you guys know exactly…and by the way, the FBI is in here [the channel] watching right now as we speak. What i’m gonna need you guys to do for me, i’m gonna need you to buy that merch when it drops,” the persistent entrepreneur began.

“Pretty much they seized all my cars. One thing they didn’t seize was the things I was able to sell a few weeks ago, even a few days ago before this shit happened. A few cars and shit.

“When I tell you they took ‘everything’, they took every SD card, every camera, every television in my house – HOUSES. They took every car. They took ALL my Hellcats. They only thing they didn’t take was my dick because it’s attached to my balls.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsakM0l9OH0?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]
Car collection, now seized

Describing himself for the benefit of newcomers, OMI insisted that his wealth isn’t the result of selling drugs. He began as an app developer for Kodi, one that “got hacked early on.” He then answered the million-dollar question – what happened with the FBI?

“It was pretty much IPTV and taxes and shit and hiring the wrong CPA [accountant]. This is really important for you guys, make sure your taxes are paid for,” he said.

That “taxes and shit” is apparently a reference to pending tax evasion and money laundering charges following a two-year IRS investigation. This is particularly interesting when one considers that OMI has regularly and persistently described pirate IPTV as legal.

“I hit a great area and exploited it and they just didn’t like it. I made a ton of money but at the same time a lot of the money I made super-legit,” he told the Q&A.

“I felt that what I was doing wasn’t illegal. Streaming is totally legal, it’s just the way they’re trying to word it, it’s a little different. But streaming isn’t illegal. It was never live television, it was always delayed television and there’s no laws against it. There’s no laws against it.

“This is Napster 2.0. This wasn’t killing anybody. If anything I saved hundreds of thousands of people [with] cheaper cable. IPTV is not illegal in the US. It isn’t. It isn’t. It’s illegal in other countries but it’s not illegal in the US.

“The [Copyright Act] has nothing to do with streaming and when they seize those servers and they realize there’s nothing being stored on these servers, you have nothing on me. Streaming is not illegal. I saw a window, I saw an opportunity, I exploited the fuck out of it. That’s all it is.”

In earlier videos, OMI said that he previously made lots of money from hosting services, including Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto servers. He also talked about selling huge numbers of Firesticks. Generally, it’s difficult to find a video where the amount of money he’s made isn’t either the sole topic of conversation or at least heavily featured.

But according to OMI, that might be more difficult in the future.

“[My friend] had to lend me a phone because I don’t have a phone. They seized millions of dollars out of all my accounts. They took all the cash I had laying around,” he says. “They took all my jewelry [a recent video has OMI apparently buying $300K’s worth], kids’ things, they took Xboxes, they took computers, laptops, cellphones. They didn’t even leave drones.”

Having previously watched a good number of OMI’s videos, his optimism and positivity have always shone through. That wasn’t the case during this Q&A. By his own estimation, he’s going to prison “for a few years” although he says he’ll also take the rap for those who worked with him.

Another particular point of interest is that OMI insists that entertainment companies never sued him.

“I could’ve dealt with the MPA or the NFL suing me, that never happened. They never gave me fair warning, which by law they have to. Especially when it comes down to a crime like this, when it comes down to ‘copyright infringement’. They were supposed to hit me with a seize operation, or a cease and desist.

“They never hit me with that. I would’ve took it right down,” he adds.

However, OMI also admits that he had been receiving takedown notices issued from the UK on behalf of “the European leagues”, which seems like a reference to either Premier League or UEFA blocking efforts. He also acknowledges receiving notices from Sky, HBO, and similar “fucking stupid channels.”

If there is a point where a defendant in a serious criminal case should stop talking and consult a lawyer, OMI doesn’t seem to know where that point is. He told viewers that the FBI is accusing him of “stealing channels” but he insists he always paid for his – before capturing them and distributing them to his customers.

“I paid for my channels. I did things the old school way. I used capture cards. I take full responsibility so anybody on my team and shit, I pretty much hope you guys don’t ever go to jail now,” he explained.

According to OMI, he knew an investigation was underway since an associate he names as ‘Hector Fuentes’ was a CI (an informant).

“So he used to come around and shit, with a little wire on and could see the wire through his fucking shirt and would say dumb shit to see how far it would get him. The mother-fucker was a confidential informant. The whole time, he was putting people in jail for a long time,” OMI claimed.

Considering this was a Q&A streamed live on YouTube, things then got dark, very dark indeed. OMI says that after being detained by the FBI and being run to the station, all he could think of was killing himself, live on YouTube.

“I’m gonna go on live….and i’m going to kill myself. I’m gonna go on live, express how I feel and then shoot myself on live.”

Thankfully, for everyone’s sake, that didn’t happen.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcNEa-kIRTQ?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]
OMI laying everything out there a few months ago

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Karl Pilkington Shares a Pirated Copy of His Own TV-Show


UK entertainment giant Sky is widely known for taking a hard line on everything piracy related.

In recent years the company has chased vendors of pirate subscriptions and hardware, both in and outside of court.

These efforts are meant to signal to the public that piracy, streaming piracy in particular, will not be tolerated. However, this message has apparently not hit home with one of the company’s own stars, Karl Pilkington.

Pilkington is an actor, comedian, and presenter who is widely known for “An Idiot Abroad,” the Sky 1 travel series with a comedic twist. He also worked with Sky on the documentary “The Moaning of Life” and more recently he ventured into the sitcom arena with the series “Sick of It”, again at Sky.

Sick of It is about to premiere its second season and to give his 1.5+ million fans on Facebook something to get in the mood, Pilkington recently decided to share an episode of the show from last year.

That usually isn’t a problem. However, Sky doesn’t share the show for free and only offers it on-demand but that didn’t prove to be too much of a hurdle for the show’s co-writer, who found a freely accessible streaming copy on Vimeo.

“For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. Here’s an episode. Series 2 soon,” Pilkington wrote.

This clearly isn’t an official release. The tags on the video reveal that this copy was sourced from a ‘scene’ group, PLUTONiUM in this case, and reuploaded to Vimeo by someone named Gary. The same person also shared a copy of the first episode through the same account.

This means that Pilkington is effectively sharing a pirated copy of his own show with over a million people. And since Sky holds at least some of the rights, that’s not supposed to happen.

The ‘mistake’ didn’t go unnoticed. Commenters on Facebook highlighted that it was a pirate release and the same was pointed out on Reddit, where many appreciated the unusual move.

The question is, of course, whether this is indeed a mistake or some kind of PR stunt. Giving over a million people a free teaser may draw in some extra eyeballs and if that’s picked up by the news, it means even more exposure.

However, when we look closer at Pilkington’s previous engagement on Facebook we started to notice a trend. Apparently, he’s keeping a close eye on the comments. When someone said that she wasn’t familiar with Sick of It, but would like to watch it, Pilkington kindly shared a link.

And that wasn’t the first time either. The show’s co-writer has been doing this for weeks, sharing the same link to everyone who shows interest. In particular, those who don’t have access to it.

To us, it appears that Pilkington means no harm and simply wants to get people to see his show. That makes sense. As a creator, you want people to enjoy what you’ve made. The fact that he’s sharing a pirated copy may not have even entered his mind.

Whether Sky will like this is another question of course. At the time of writing all links are still online, but it wouldn’t be a massive surprise if they are soon taken down. Technically, Pilkington is now a repeat infringer so he could even lose his Facebook account.

Unless he takes action before Sky does, of course.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





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Cox Knew About Pirating Subscribers, Court Concludes


Last year Cox settled its piracy liability lawsuit with music rights company BMG.

While the company hoped that this would be the end of its copyright woes, the next legal battle was already being prepared.

This time, the ISP was up against 53 music companies, including Capitol Records, Warner Bros, and Sony Music.

The rightsholders complained that Cox categorically failed to terminate repeat copyright infringers and that it substantially profited from this ongoing ‘piracy’ activity. All at the expense of the music companies and other rightsholders.

A year later the case is heading to trial where Cox will have to defend itself once again. However, not before some final issues are resolved.

In August, both Cox and the music companies requested summary judgments on several crucial issues. Among other things, the ISP requested a ruling that it’s not vicariously liable for copyright infringement.

This week US District Court Judge Liam O’Grady ruled on the requests. He decided to deny most, stating that these issues will be resolved at trial. The Judge did, however, issue a ruling on whether Cox had “knowledge” of the allegedly pirating customers.

The music companies asked to have this issue resolved before trial. It is a crucial question, as it determines whether the ISP can be held contributorily liable for pirating subscribers or not.

Cox first argued that the notices failed to identify many copyrighted works. For example, in some cases, the music companies only identified one song from a torrent that contained more works. In addition, the notices only highlighted infringements of sound recordings, not the compositions.

The court, however, waved away this defense and concluded that the notices are certainly specific enough when it comes to specific sound recordings. They include a title, timestamp, date, notice id, IP-address, and hash, among other things.

“Based on the level of detail included in the notices directed at Cox and its subscribers, there is no doubt that Defendants had more than just ‘generalized knowledge’ of infringement,” Judge O’Grady writes.

“Thus, the Court finds as a matter of law that there is no genuine issue of fact regarding the sufficiency of the RIAA notices in this case, and that they can support the knowledge element of a contributory infringement claim,” he adds.

The second question is whether these notices, which the RIAA sent, can lead to the conclusion that Cox had knowledge of the infringements in a legal sense. The ISP denied this, but according to the court, it’s clear that the notices are sufficient.

“It would be farcical to argue that Cox had no knowledge of the hundreds of thousands of notices it received indicating infringement for the works in suit,” Judge O’Grady writes.

“The notices were sent to an email address Cox created for the very purpose of receiving this information, and were processed by a corporate department dedicated to abuse and security for Cox.”

Finally, Cox also argued that it can’t be liable for alleged infringements that occurred through business subscribers, as it can’t identify individual users of these businesses. However, the court ruled that there is no ground to exclude business subscribers at this point.

All in all, it is clear that Cox had specific enough knowledge of pirating subscribers to hold it contributorily liable. However, to do so, a jury must also conclude that the ISP contributed to or induced the infringements. That will be decided at trial.

In addition to the “knowledge” question, Judge O’Grady also ruled that the music companies own or control the exclusive rights to all works that are part of the case, something Cox contested.

With these issues ‘resolved’ the case is yet another step close to trial, which is currently scheduled to take place next month.

—

A copy of US District Court Judge Liam O’Grady’s memorandum opinion and order is available here (pdf).

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Police Arrest Three in Prolonged Movie2K Piracy Investigation


Way back in 2013, Movie2K was not only one of the most-visited pirate sites, but also one of the most popular platforms on the entire Internet.

Offering all of the latest movies and TV shows in a convenient interface, during February that year Movie2K was the 240th most popular site in the world.

In Germany, where the site was particularly well-received, it was the 19th most popular site, period, pulling more traffic than Twitter, Amazon, Apple and PayPal. Understandably, the site attracted plenty of anti-piracy attention but suddenly, at the end of May 2013, the site shut down without warning.

In its wake appeared Movie4K, a site that bore more than a passing resemblance to its similarly-named predecessor, but it now appears that the authorities in Germany had not simply forgotten about Movie2K or bringing those behind it to justice.

According to the Attorney General’s Office in Dresden, two men aged 44 and 37 were arrested last Thursday in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Bavaria. The men are suspected former operators of Movie2K.

The men are reported to have distributed 880,000 copies of movies and TV shows between the fall of 2008 when Movie2K was founded and May 2013 when it closed down. They are also suspected of operating the streaming site Stream2K.com.

Movie2K before its closure

A spokesperson for the Prosecutor General’s Office told SWR that the man from Rhineland-Palatinate had been living there for some time and that extensive evidence had been seized including computer equipment, cell phones, cash and documents.

Investigators claim that the suspects generated “several million euros” from advertising and other methods via Movie2K, which stepped in to become one of the world’s largest illegal streaming portals after the demise of Kino.to. That site was shut down following one of the most significant anti-piracy operations in history.

The Attorney General’s Office further revealed that a third man was arrested in Berlin last week. He is described as a 37-year-old real estate entrepreneur who was detained under suspicion of money laundering offenses.

It’s claimed that the individual worked with the former operators of Movie2K in the fall of 2013, managing some of the revenues generated by the men by making financial investments and obtaining real estate in Saxony, Brandenburg and Berlin.

The numbers under discussion are significant, with the authorities claiming that the alleged money-launderer received more than 5.1 million euros from the other suspects through a Dutch mailbox company alone by mid-2016.

The home and business addresses of the defendants were searched with the support of officials of the Land Office of Criminal Investigation Berlin and the Criminal Investigation Police Bamberg.

As highlighted by Tarnkappe, the Prosecutor General’s Office was previously involved in the case brought against Kino.to. It’s suspected that there were links between that now-defunct site and the operators of Movie2K.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





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Pirate IPTV: Spanish Police Target €1m Supplier, 12 People Arrested


Raids, shutdowns, legal action, settlements, and even technical issues have caused many sellers of ‘pirate’ IPTV to shut down in recent months.

The end to the problem for broadcasters, however, seems as far away as ever, with large numbers of providers and sellers managing to service the illicit market, despite serious setbacks.

Hoping to make a dent in the supply chain, police in Spain say they have carried out an operation to “dismantle” a service that sourced raw TV streams and distributed them, supplied VOD content, and then sold packages to clients.

The investigation began in 2017 when officers of the Central Cybercrime Unit became aware of a Facebook page where access to pirate TV was being offered.

Investigators determined that those behind the operation were capturing channels broadcast by the major TV outfits and uploading them to servers operated by different companies abroad. At the same time, they operated a sales and marketing division, to sell their product to the public.

In total, 12 people were identified as suspects, with four people said to have been in charge of capturing the broadcast signals and distributing them, managing access to content, attracting customers, and collecting the cash through various platforms.

The remaining eight were considered resellers of the services. These individuals obtained access to the main platform from the four operators at a reduced cost in order to market these subscriptions to their own customers in Spain and overseas.

Image credit: Policia Nacional

The two-year investigation came to head last Friday when the 12 suspects were arrested when raids were carried out on addresses in Madrid, Toledo, Alicante, Murcia, Gran Canaria, Tenerife and other locations.

Seven websites and two social media profiles were shut down and 86 decoders, 15 hard drives, 10 computers, NAS drives, 17 mobile phones, a ‘high-end’ vehicle and more than 22,000 euros in cash were seized.

According to police, the as-yet-unnamed service generated an estimated 1,000,000 euros for its operators who are now charged with various offenses including intellectual property crimes, belonging to a criminal organization, and money laundering.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTCZZuRbYko?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]
Police raids across Spain

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Kodi "Leia" 18.5 Release


In our ongoing mission to bring you the very greatest (and most reliable) media centre software in the world, it’s time to let another point release escape into the wild. Usual rules apply: this isn’t about features, it’s about stability and usability.

As usual, you can find a full summary of closed pull requests on GitHub, but the summary would be…

Interface/Look-and-Feel

  • Estuary and GUI info fixes, including scrollbar behaviour, icon names, label changes
  • Add dual support for Artist Slideshow 2.x and 3.x
  • Fix to always allow ‘Black’ screen saver
  • Fix wrong sort order list for music playlists node

Playback/Display

  • Fixes to external subtitle playback
  • Fixes to support for archives over UPnP
  • Fixes to “queue item” and “play next” for STRM files with Plugin URL
  • Fixes to “hide watched” status for videos
  • Fixes to resume handling when marking a file as unwatched

PVR

  • Fixes to EPG database storage, start/stop of PVR service
  • Fix handling of open modal dialogs
  • Fixes to commercial skip (EDL) processing 

Other/General Fixes

  • Multiple Android changes around windowing, secure decoder and SDK versions
  • Multiple iOS changes, including support for iPhone 11 and 7th generation iPad, plus fixes for touch input, overlapping drawing surfaces, sandbox checks, notch support.
  • MacOS fixes around windowing, where only a portion of the screen was correctly rendered
  • Log files improvements around verbosity and security
  • Shoutcast improvements
  • Various fixes and improvements to add-on settings, package build documentation, build system, advancedsettings.xml, skin/profile changes and many other subsystems

 

The nature of point releases is that most of these changes won’t be visible to most people unless they address a specific problem you’d stumbled across. That said, they’re all real bugs, and real fixes, so thanks as always to all who found a bug, took the time to report it and, in some cases, provided a fix.

The full v18.5 changelog can be found in our GitHub milestone. If you want to read back on what was actually changed in v18 itself, you can find the corresponding articles in the blog posts – Kodi 18, Kodi 18.1, Kodi 18.2, Kodi 18.3 and Kodi 18.4.

Application delpoyment on different platforms (notably, Google Play and the Microsoft Store) varies due to circumstances outside of our control. It may thus take a few more days to appear everywhere, so just stay tuned.

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‘Royalty-Free’ Music Supplied By YouTube Results in Mass Video Demonetization


Matt Lowne is a very popular YouTuber with a passion for the simulation game Kerbal Space Program. Since 2013 he’s amassed close to 56 million views but late last week, his video world was turned upside down.

In common with many YouTubers, Matt didn’t want any copyright issues on his channel. So, to play things safely, he obtained the track ‘Dreams‘ by Joakim Karud from YouTube’s very own audio library for use in his intro. Unfortunately, this strategy of obtaining supposedly risk-free music from a legitimate source still managed to backfire.

Very early last Friday, Matt says he received a “massive barrage” of emails from YouTube, targeting “pretty much all” of his KSP videos. The emails said that Matt’s videos “may have content owned or licensed by SonyATV, PeerMusic, Warner Chappell, Audiam and LatinAutor.”

Some of the YouTube demonetization emails

A clearly exasperated Matt took to YouTube, noting that any ads that now show up on his videos “split up the revenue between all the companies listed” in the emails, with Matt himself “allowed to keep what’s left of that.” He doesn’t know what that amount might be, because he says there’s just no way of knowing.

After highlighting the vague use of the word “may” in YouTube’s emails to him, Matt then went on to describe the real “kick in the gut”, which revolves around the track itself.

‘Dreams’ composer Joakim Karud allows anyone to use his music on YouTube, even commercially, for free. And the fact that Matt downloaded the track from YouTube’s own library was the icing on this particularly bitter cake.

“So I guess this library can’t be trusted at all,” says Matt. “YouTube might just remove songs from it after the fact and then shrug off any consequences for videos that use that music as you know, shit happens.”

Matt said he had to time out to manually protest the automated claims against his account but he says his overtures were immediately rejected, “almost like it’s an automated bot or something.” But things get worse from there.

After contesting each claim and having all of those rejected, Matt says the only option left is to appeal every single one. However, if an appeal is lost, the video in question will be removed completely and a strike will be placed against his account.

It’s three strikes and you’re out on YouTube, so this is not an attractive option for Matt if the music companies somehow win the fight. So, instead, Matt is appealing against just one of the complaints in the hope that he can make some progress without putting his entire account at risk.

Matt says he won’t be able to risk putting any music in his videos in future, because even with the best intentions, a “billion-dollar corporation” can simply decide that they “would like to start benefiting off your blood, sweat and tears.”

Worryingly, searches online show that not only are other people affected by similar mass complaints, but there may – may – be an explanation for what is going on here.

“SonyATV & Warner Chappell have claimed 24 of my videos because the royalty free song Dreams by Joakim Karud (from the OFFICIAL YOUTUBE AUDIO LIBRARY BTW) uses a sample from Kenny Burrell Quartet’s ‘Weaver of Dream’,” a Twitter user wrote on Saturday.

Sure enough, if one turns to the WhoSampled archive, Dreams is listed as having sampled Weaver of Dreams, a track from 1956 to which Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. own the copyrights.

If the trend of claims against ‘Dreams’ continues, there is potential for huge upheaval on YouTube and elsewhere. Countless thousands of videos use the track and as a result it has become very well-known. Sadly, people trying to claim it as their own is nothing new but fingers crossed, common sense will sort out the present issues.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjVJ3Cznec?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

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DevCon 2019 – Belgrade – Part I


Another year passes, and here we are once again, locked in a windowless room to discuss all things Kodi-shaped. Genuine thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and users – that means you, you lovely people – whose donations make these meetings possible. Old faces, new faces, guests – these events really do help us to come together, share ideas and shape the direction of our favourite media software.

So, where are we? Well, this blog post comes to you from Belgrade, the capital of the Balkan state of Serbia, at the crossroads of central and south-east Europe. A city of some 1.25 million people, Belgrade has a long and turbulent history: the area has been inhabited for some 8,000 years, and has been home to, or part of, the Vinča culture, Celts, the Roman Empire, Slavs, the Bulgarian Empire, the Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburgs and Yugoslavia. 

On with the show…

 

After the usual round of introductions, kambala opened the show with a session on crash reporting: whether and how we could collect more crash logs by making it semi-automated or just generally easier (“Kodi has had a problem, would you like to send a report to the developers?” sort of thing). If we can get better insights, particularly into “silent” crashes, then we can get to work on eliminating bugs without waiting until someone gets annoyed enough to report it. Of course, we need to balance data volumes, human workload, user privacy, platform/component-specifics, and several other factors before we go down this road, so it isn’t something that would appear tomorrow.

Next up, DarrenHill gave an update on forum activity and moderation. Overall, we’ve got a solid, worldwide team of moderators and a good suite of supporting tools that have had a significant positive impact on volumes of spam or undesirable posts. There’s more user-led engagement around what we can and can’t support on the forum; we’ve improved how we can notify our users when there’s an upstream problem (e.g. with metadata providers) that might cause issues with Kodi; spammers are either blocked at source or removed from the forum very swiftly. What we’re perhaps lacking, though, is more diligence around the wiki as a source of help – keeping this up-to-date as Kodi continues to grow and improve. As usual, volunteers are always welcome.

Our 2019 Google Summer of Code student, gusandrianos, took the microphone next to talk about his work on multi-pass shaders in RetroPlayer. Shaders are GPU routines that handle scaling, colours, lighting, shading, etc., and are used in RetroPlayer to change the look-and-feel of games as individual frames are rendered: pixellation, colour saturation, scaling, video effects, and similar. More information can be found via the GSoC website here.

Keith then stepped up to lead a discussion about Kodi’s trademark policy and how we work with community groups that wish to use our code and/or branding.  This covers projects which effectively bundle or build Kodi for specific purposes (e.g. LibreELEC or Debian) as well as complete rebranding (e.g. OSMC, SPMC). What we’re really trying to do is protect our intellectual property while being as easy to work with as we can be: we’ve probably been a bit heavy-handed in the past, and this isn’t helpful when people are simply trying (for the most part) to do the right thing. This conversation then led into how we include more “stakeholders” into our conversations – people who aren’t team members, who maybe aren’t specifically contributing to Kodi, but who are still doing interesting, relevant things that should be embraced. The conversation also covered “best practices” and how we can more easily advise people what they can and can’t do, or under what conditions.

The afternoon session kicked off with Keith giving an overview of Kodi’s financial position – where our money has come from, where it’s gone back out to, what we have left. Changing financial regulations around the world also mean that we need to re-assess our bank account setup, specifically in terms of how we keep “local” accounts to receive donations and pay expenses in e.g. EUR when we’re incorporated in the US.

Within the team, we use Slack extensively to talk to each other on both broad (e.g. “moderators”) and narrow (e.g. “HDR on Windows”) topics, so we had a conversation about all the channels we have that team members may have missed. We also talked about external channels, which we have so we can invite guests, bridge to IRC, and similar. If you collaborate with Team Kodi in any way and would find this useful, please let us know and we’ll set something up.

Next up, yol and DaVu led a conversation about how, now we’ve completed the move, switching bug tracking from Trac to GitHub Issues has worked out. In general, it’s working well, although we need to tighten up how we tag issues to both make sure they get routed correctly and, ultimately, to ensure that they get closed off once complete. You can find the current list of open and closed issues on our GitHub code repository. We’ve adopted a similar process for tagging pull requests, although we clearly need to improve our approach for notifying, reviewing and merging PRs given the backlog we’ve built up.

We talked a little about the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and what this means for us – specifically, the forum, as that’s arguably personally-identifiable information. Generally, we don’t aim to collect such information, and people’s posts are made publicly and thus outside of the scope of the legislation. However, there are still perhaps some tweaks we can make to ensure all “fingerprints” are removed should someone ask.

The next topic was around the vision for Kodi and how it fits into the streaming world we find ourselves in. The conversation was started off by da-anda, reflecting how we, as individuals, have seen our viewing habits change in recent years. This is a big topic, as there are as many political issues as there are any others: as part of the battle between themselves, the “walled garden” content providers fiercely defend the ‘user experience’ via their specific interface and applications. This obviously has real implications for any attempts to bring streamed content into a combined library view.

The conversation moved on with a conversation about add-ons – specifically, how they’re listed and shown, which is currently best summarised as “in a long list, not all of which will work for everyone even if you know what they might be for”. Can we group them? Can we tag them? Who would, how? We also touched on use cases – how clumsy it is to add your own home videos or similar content, for example – and also how else people do or could use Kodi. And we also talked about the implications for core developer time (both as mentors and programmers), and our constant need for more people who are motivated and interested in contributing significant features to the project; if nothing else, it’s futile to have a roadmap or list of features if we then can’t actually implement them. Kodi is a fantastic playground for experienced C++ developers and for those who wish to develop these skills; you don’t need to be a video guru either, as there’s an awful lot of code around the core player/renderer routines. Go on: you know you want to…

The day continued with a1rwulf and the work he’s been doing on metadata and database storage. This is major re-work that impacts large pieces of code throughout the application, so merging it needs to be done carefully. However, it brings about significant performance improvements, scales to large databases better, and brings new functionality around music sources and playlists. Some of these functions might better implemented as binary add-ons so they can be ported to the core application sooner rather than later – the benefit of taking a more modular approach.

Rounding off the session, then, garbear introduced a discussion around Kodi versioning which quickly led into plans for Kodi 19 “Matrix”. New features or capabilities notwithstanding, Python 2 goes end-of-life on New Year’s Day 2020 – the clock is literally ticking down – and that gives a growing imperative to release the Python 3 version of Kodi into the wild. There are, of course, other issues to address and other code to include before we can release, and a final check that Python 3 doesn’t break more than it solves, so it’s a balancing act now.

 

And that concludes our first day. As the sun sets on Belgrade, it’s time to head out into the Balkan night in search of beer and something to eat. Okay, mostly beer.

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Judge Recommends Denial of $150,000 Piracy Judgment Against APK Download Site


In April, a group of movie companies filed a lawsuit against the operators of various websites that promoted and distributed the Showbox app.

Showbox and similarly named clones are used by millions of people. These apps enable users to stream movies via torrents and direct sources, using a Netflix-style interface.

The tools are a thorn in the side of movie companies, including those behind “The Hitman’s Bodyguard,” “London Has Fallen,” and “Hunter Killer.” In a complaint filed at a U.S. District Court in Hawaii, the companies pointed out that Showbox facilitates massive piracy.

“The Defendants misleadingly promote the Show Box app as a legitimate means for viewing content to the public, who eagerly install the Show Box app to watch copyright protected content, thereby leading to profit for the Defendants,” the 58-page complaint read.

The movie outfits went after several defendants suspected of having ties to one or more piracy-related sites. This includes a Vietnamese man named Nghi Phan Nhat, who allegedly operates the APK download portal ‘apkmirrordownload.com.’

The site stood accused of offering the ShowBox and Popcorn Time apps, which have since been removed, but the defendant never responded to the allegations in court. This prompted the movie companies to file a motion for a default judgment.

In September, they requested $150,000 in statutory damages, as well as thousands of dollars in attorney fees and costs. In addition, they asked for an injunction ordering third party services such as hosting companies and domain registrars to stop doing business with the site.

While the defendant remained silent, the Court referred that matter to a magistrate judge for a recommendation. Although default judgments are often easily granted, in this case, Hawaii’s Magistrate Judge Kenneth Mansfield advises denial of the request.

In their motion, the filmmakers argued that the Court has personal jurisdiction over the operator of the site. This requires a relationship between the foreign defendant and the US. To establish this, it has to pass the three-part minimum contacts test.

The first part of this test is to show that the defendant purposefully directed activities to the United States or purposefully availed himself of the privileges of conducting activities there.

According to the movie companies, this is certainly the case, since the site is quite popular in the US and also presented entirely in English. However, that’s not enough to establish personal jurisdiction, according to the Judge.

“That the APK Site is in English does not show purposeful direction, as the United States is not the only country with English as an official language. Nor is Plaintiffs’ allegation that the United States is the country with the second most traffic to the APK site evidence of purposeful direction,” Judge Mansfield writes.

The filmmakers further argued that the defendant purposefully availed himself to the State of Hawaii by conducting business with US-based companies, domain registrar Namesilo and CDN provider Cloudflare. However, the Magistrate Judge disagrees again.

“While Defendant Nhat may have contacts with California and Arizona pursuant to his registration with United States companies, such contacts are not extensive enough to invoke nationwide jurisdiction such that it is reasonable to subject Defendant Nhat to litigation in any United States federal forum,” the Judge writes.

The fact that the APK download site references the US DMCA law on its site is not good enough either. According to the Judge that merely means that the site is in compliance with the DMCA, not that the defendant subjects himself to the jurisdiction of US courts.

Based on these and other arguments, Judge Mansfield concludes that the Court doesn’t have personal jurisdiction over the alleged site operator. Without even considering the other two elements of the minimum contacts test, he recommends denying the motion for a default judgment.

The recommendation is a setback for the movie companies. If the Court adopts it, they will not get their $150,000 damages through a default judgment. Neither will they get an injunction to take the site offline.

The filmmakers had more success a few weeks ago when they reached an agreement with the Pakistani operator of ‘latestshowboxapp.com,’ who agreed to pay a $150,000 settlement. Whether that will be paid in full is another question.

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A copy of Magistrate Judge Kenneth Mansfield’s findings and recommendations is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.





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