[da-anda]

guys, please remember that we also fight against connecting Kodi with piracy to protect the project itself and not get shut down by the movie industry or whoever. Also, I personally don't want the project I donate my time for to be associated with piracy.

We can't control how Kodi is being used by the users and we don't want to limit the freedom of the users in any way because we believe in software freedom, but it's main aim is not to support piracy but to be a awesome media center for your media collection. And in same way that cracked or illegal games can be played on Windows, and videos where a man rapes a baby can be watched and downloaded with Firefox, Kodi can also be misused to do illegal stuff, but none of the mentioned software is or want's to be associated with this. So please respect our fight against associating Kodi with piracy and don't claim we're looking away or that piracy is the main point of Kodi (which it might be to you, but not for us).

[j1nx]

@da-anda,

Off course I respect that you personally don't want the project you donate our time to is associated with piracy. The message I tried to get across with m rather way to bitchy and personal feeling weigthed message was;

You guy's did an amazing job with the Raspberry-Pi port of the package. Soon this extended into great embedded linux support that spread around multiple devices. Expensive and cheap. This brought an tremendous increase in kodi users, however I think the biggest jump was when you guys suprised everybody half a year later with the Android port of Kodi.

From there on, almost any cheap ass device could be used to run Kodi and therefor the userbase took his biggest leap.

In one way this is cool, but the dark side of it is that; The project lost it's "special / nerdy / technical" (don't know the word I really mean) status. First it was for the rather "elite" techy nerd that build an HTPC. (Ask any of those new Android / RPi users what the abbreviation HTPC means and most of them fail to answer I think).

Now, anybody can run it. I seriously remember collegues talking to each other about a "device" (Rpi) that could play any movie, tvserie or album and a lot of legal and illegal online content. How it worked, they could not explain. But is was cheap and it worked. Nothing special ou think, other than these collegues normally went to the ICT depertment if the batteries of their wireless mouse needed to be replaced.


Now to my point; With this tremendous increase of users which is still be going on and will keep growing, hence probably faster and faster. The exposure to the piracy is also growing at the same rate. You are having a hard time to control it now, you will not be able to control it next year.

So with that in mind; The failure of controlling the piracy will result in an imminent fall of the project as it is now. I have no doubt that IF this project in it's current Kodi form will fall, some other project (fork) will very soon arise from the dark side of the internet.

That would mean the end of Kodi, and the beginning of something new.

So in my opinion to "save" this project, it needs to make sure the above could not happen, meaning moving code, legal entities etc. Only than, this project is still called Kodi.

And there is no one to blame for this as it is just the natural evolution of the project. You can point fingers to guys like TVAddons, SuperRepo, hence even me, but that does not change the course that has been set in motion last year (or 2 years ago). Bring TVAddons.ag down and tvaddons.tv pops-up.

So rather than keep fighting and fail. Keep fighting, but prepare for the worse.


(Above is my opinion on how I see the past, current state and future of the Kodi project)

[Robotica]

Let me assure you that this is not allowed by us to let QNAP make such blogs. I will notify our contact at QNAP immediately. They are a respectable big company and we would not expect them to make such blogs.
This is what happens when left side of the company doesn't know what the right side does. So some blog happy employee likely made it while not having the full knowledge or approval from his/her boss.

Actually, QNAP is completely within their rights with that blog post. Following trademark law is not the same as following our trademark policy, which is written to require more than the law does. Trademark protection is not total control. They wrote a how-to guide, and not much more. Their own guide makes it clear that the content, add-ons, and such, are not provided by Kodi.

It is very stupid that they've done this, but we should politely ask them to change it rather than make demands.

EDIT: and just to be clear, I'm very mad at them and I think this is very fucked up, even if it isn't "technically" a violation of trademark.

As you say. But reading statements like Martijn is making, I think the policies aren't clear, even for teammembers. You extended the trademark laws with extra requirements which are unclear for people. Simple put: trademarks won't give control over distribution by forks.

I think it's great that QNAP give Kodi some free commercials while Kodi itself still is disassociated with piracy. QNAP is. Why worry about those vendors? Let them be and grow Kodi and other platforms. You need to have damn good GPL-products (and a full fledged organisation, business model, cost structure, etc) to monotize on trademarks. To me, those stickers are worthless since Kodi is to free to fork and distribute. But what is the price to register trademarks all over the world and occasionally actively enforce it?

Rationle: Real value is regular Kodi releases and a good flow of commits in Github. In other words, worry about the codebase itself.

And why would you want to be on FireTV? Enough other platforms to grow Kodi. Yes, Stores will allways be troublesome with GPL products. If it's easy to be in a store, do so. If it isn't leave it.

[natethomas]

Robotica, what in the world are talking about? Fire TV? Are you having the same conversation as the rest of us?

Also, I think you don't appear to understand trademark law. We cannot extend it. That's not how it works. The only purpose of a trademark policy is to provide exceptions to make it easier for users and other businesses to work with us. If the policy didn't exist, then simply put, nobody could use the mark at all for any reason that might even begin to cause confusion. Our goal is to clear up the fairly tenuous question of confusion by laying out ways that we think it would be alright to use the mark that wouldn't lead to an immediate law suit.

No one needs to extend the law, because the law is already HEAVILY weighted in our favor. If we think confusion is being created, then that's almost all we need to start legal proceedings. We typically won't, because we like companies like QNAP and would rather work with them than against them, but don't for a minute think that the law isn't 100% on our side.

[da-anda]

@j1nx - well, we for sure can't stop users using Kodi to watch pirated content, but maybe we can stop the "buy my cheap ass fully loaded Kodi box and become a pirate without knowing it" situation, especially because these boxes target dumb end users that might not even realize that what they are doing by using these boxes is illegal (people are really dumb these days). Also, there would be different ways to promote pirated content, like by "my box comes with awesome Kodi media center and XYZ. Kodi does this and that and XYZ allows you to watch the latest movies for free) - establish your own piracy brand if you want but don't use Kodi for it. Still not perfect but IMO better than current situation.

edit: this is just my personal opinion