[greektv]

Good day,

I'm the publisher of THE MONTREAL GREEK TIMES printed newspaper and the Television channel owner of MONTREAL GREEK TV, which operates legally in Canada with CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), the public authority in charge of regulating and supervising Canadian broadcasting. We are licensed as Class B Regional Channel undertaking in the Greek Language, and we operate in both subscription and free Digital platforms (ROKU, FilmON, Android, SmartTV, IPTV, Apple TV, KODI, online, etc).

Some months ago, we hired the services of a developer to create a KODI Add-on for MONTREAL GREEK TV to be accessed by our Television viewers free of charge in the official KODI Repository.

We advertise Montreal Greek TV channel in the printed edition of The Montreal Greek Times newspaper as being available many OTT and IPTV platforms, one of them being KODI:



On or about April 14 2018 MONTREAL GREEK TV channel Add-on was removed from the KODI Repository and our viewers couldn't access our Television Channel, newspaper or Radio Broadcasts from the KODI platform.  I then communicated with the developer, and I was inform there was an issue with his account.

On April 17 2018 I created an account with Github to have MONTREAL GREEK TV KODI channel in it's own account, and asked the developer who created the Add-on for us to transfer the App to our Television Station's account.

Yesterday our TV Channel Pull Request #1912 was identified as "spam", denied and closed.

I don't understand what happened with the developer's personal account in the past, but whatever happened it's totally unrelated with our Television Broadcasting operations and it's totally unacceptable and unprofessional to have our Legal Channel removed from the KODI's distribution system without warning or the possibility to look into the matter in a professional manner.

My understanding was the KODI platform favours legal content, over pirated streams.  Our channel is licensed by the CRTC in Canada, and this unjust action puts our channel at an unfair disadvantage over pirated streams.

Can a KODI team member please communicate with me at [email protected] as I will be putting a news story together in the newspaper (both in print and online) to justify this unfair behavior.

This is totally unacceptable.

Dimitri Papadopoulos,
publisher
THE MONTREAL GREEK TIMES
www.greektimes.ca
4992 Notre-Dame Blvd.
Laval, QC H7W 1V5
Canada

Tel: 514-998-0878
Fax: 514-221-2425

[greektv]

I insist,

I would like to have an explanation from Team Kodi for this illicit behavior against our Television channel.

I have to explain to our newspaper and television viewers why our licensed channel was pulled without warning, and why our request is being flagged as "spam & closed"?

what exactly is "illegal" in our request?

Is this how TEAM KODI treats legit channels, and allows pirated channels to exist without issues?

Dimitri Papadopoulos
THE MONTREAL GREEK TIMES


Please respond on time, as I'm looking to publish both sides of the

[natethomas]

Hi Dimitri, I'll also email you at your email for follow up questions, but the short answer goes like this: To my knowledge there is nothing wrong with your add-on. Right now. But the developer you decided to hire has been known to put malware including bitcoin miners into add-ons without user permission. There are a lot of things we're happy to forgive and forget as a learning experience, but intentionally including malware in an add-on simply isn't one of those "learning experience" moments. Everyone should just know you don't start a botnet without the permission of the users. That's just not acceptable. When we discovered that developer was still working on your add-on (going so far as to even continue using the name he'd used to distribute malware), we did not feel comfortable allowing an add-on he was working on into our repository. I'm told there are also several links inside the add-on that don't point to your domain, which further makes us nervous, given the history of this developer.

If you cut ties with this developer and submit an addon written by a different developer, I'm sure we'd be happy to reconsider the decision. But sticking with him is simply not a way to stay in the Kodi repo. Users can always download the addon from a 3rd party repo, if you're that dedicated to sticking with this developer. As a rule, Kodi not only favors legal content over illegal content, but we actively ban pirated content from our forum and repo. And we take a similar approach to developers who knowingly distribute malware. All are equally not allowed in our repository.

On a side note, if you believe Kodi is allowing a pirate channel to exist in the official Kodi repo, please feel free to point it out. We try to stay on top of these things, but are always happy to review potential issues.

[greektv]

Thank you natethomas for your reply.

I'm not aware of any bitcoin practices of this developer, but definitely this was not in our App.

Our app should have never been removed because of the independent actions of this developer, outside of our operations!

It's like shutting down the transmitter of a TV Station, because a worker down the line allegedly did something wrong elsewhere.

Feel free to take disciplinary action and/or corrective measures against the person involved is what I believe is the right thing to do, instead of taking our channel down!

I look forward to resolve this issue in private.

Respectfully yours,

//signed//
Dimitri Papadopoulos

[0thgiliwt]

Good day, this is twilight0.

I just couldn't resist not registering a new account to try and defend my position, even in this place. I don't care if you ban this account as well. This email address is for spam anyway. I didn't even care for not having forum access FFS. But rejecting an addon simply like that, is outrageous. The reasoning behind it is one of those "facepalm moments". The addon is completely unrelated to that other addon I had available. So I am going straight to the point.

Dimitri is free to choose anyone who he sees fit to develop his addon and reach other greeks in his local community and abroad, of course. Eventually I was given the chance to prove I care for all my fellow greeks in the world many times and I am still proving my trustworthiness. We know each other personally. I have stated many times on reddit how it worked and the process was not hardcoded inside the addon but rather it was opening a web browser outside of Kodi, with a link pointing into the coinhive gateway in the form of a redirecting short link. Yes, it was my mistake not letting users know through the addon that a coinhive link is about to be opened and yes I admitted that a tweet was not enough. Are these all enough for a damn cut straight ban with so little process? Even Mark Zuckerberg has made that huge mistake for selling users' data, but he was still forgiven for all that.

Your cold heart has not gone unnoticed, off course you realize that. Is this the world we want to live in? I am not a guy like lambda to code DDOS attack that is a really serious matter.

[greektv]

Thank you all.
I now have a better understanding of what happened, and I look forward to resolve this issue in private.
I have nothing further to add in this forum.

Dimitri P.

[natethomas]

Sounds good. Thread closed.