Many rumors and false assumptions concerning Kodi recently, has lead to a reality where too many uninformed users actually believes that Kodi is a law breaking software.
When the latest April fools prank conducted by team Kodi ended up, revealing it was only a harmless joke in the spirit of the day. Comments such as: “who else thinks they [team Kodi] are pushing their luck“, or, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ll [team Kodi] get arrested for real soon” started showing up all over the Web (the prank involved a fake law enforcement message left on Kodi website saying the domain was seized).
Interestingly enough, what originally meant as a joke with the potential of getting more people aware of Kodi’s legal status, had in fact backfired and contributed to amplifying the misconception regarding it tenfold more.
In addition, a vibrant discussion held within core Kodi community regarding DRM (Digital Rights Management) – whether and how should Kodi support DRM technologies meant to protect content creators from piracy – the discussion also caused a lot of confusion, this time from another perspective which basically alludes that Kodi may seal off lots of 3rd-party addons by blocking non DRM signed content.
Therefore and due to other reasons as well, team Kodi has decided to put an end to the misconception.
Kodi’s Stance Regarding Piracy & DRM
According to Kodi’s Dev Journal[1], Kodi “enables piracy the same way Firefox and Chrome do”, that is, Kodi is merely a neutral platform where the user is, in fact, in charge of the content that goes through it.
As they did in the past, once more team Kodi clarifies that their goal is not being a content provider, rather, they’d more than welcome content publishers to work together with the team in order to deliver users with content, whether it’s DRM signed or not.
As for DRM, team Kodi mentions that they are actually looking for a way to support DRM signed content, albeit not by including DRM technology within Kodi but via utilizing the DRM already present on a user’s system “while video playback and control stays with Kodi”.
To sum it all up, here’s Team Kodi’s formal stance in four short sentences:
- “Kodi will never provide content, DRMed or not.”
- “Kodi will never stop working with your content.”
- “We will never prevent you from using Kodi as you so choose.”
- “We do not condone, condemn, encourage or recommend any particular use of Kodi.”
Is your mind rested now?
