Matrix Posted April 22, 2019 Share Posted April 22, 2019 The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the global anti-piracy coalition which includes the major Hollywood studios, plus Netflix, Amazon and others, is keeping the pressure on. The group recently managed to shut down another group of Kodi add-ons and builds. According to ACE, this is part of a broader "piracy reduction plan," which is starting to pay off. During the summer of 2017, several of the largest entertainment industry companies in the world teamed up to create a new anti-piracy coalition. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) brought together well-known Hollywood outfits including Disney, Warner Bros, NBCUniversal, media giants such as Sky and BBC, as well as the streaming-based newcomers Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu. This is without a doubt one of the most prominent copyright enforcement groups in history and one with a clear mission. ACE wants to bring a halt to all forms of piracy but with a specific focus on online streaming, which it sees as a major threat to its industry. The organization has filed several lawsuits in the US, for example, targeting vendors of pirate streaming boxes. This has been quite effective so far, with Dragon Box settling for $14.5 million TickBox TV agreeing to pay $25 million in damages. However, behind the scenes, there have been many less visible enforcement efforts as well. ACE regularly reaches out to developers who create ‘add-ons’ and ‘builds’ that are specifically designed to access pirated content through streaming boxes, including those running Kodi. These efforts are not made public by ACE, but the targeted developers sometimes speak about them in public. Last week, for example, when the Hydra9 repository was targeted, among others. “Some in the community got served ACE letters yesterday, including myself. My letter specifically mentions most of my builds, and the Hydra9 repo,” developer ‘Terror’ informed people on Telegram, sharing a cease and desist letter. “I have made so many friends in this community and the Hydra9 team has been the highlight of my time making builds. I will likely continue as a skinner/teacher only, after I’m done dealing with ACE,” he added. The letter in question is similar to those that have gone out to many other developers since 2017. As can be seen below, it comes with a rather impressive list of logos from entertainment industry companies, to which Discovery Inc., Channel 5, and Telefe have yet to be added. It appears that these efforts have been quite successful but thus far ACE hasn’t said much about them in public. To find out more, we asked the organization whether it could share any data on how many of these requests it has sent out over the past two years. While we didn’t get any exact figures from ACE, which clearly doesn’t want to give away too much, the group said that a “significant” number of developers and site operators cooperated after being notified. “ACE has sought and obtained voluntary cooperation from a significant number of owners, operators, and developers of sites, add-ons, and services that facilitate piracy,” ACE spokesperson Richard VanOrnum told us. ACE targets people throughout the world and says it prioritizes voluntary measures over lawsuits. Through these efforts, it hopes to boost the legal market. Thus far, the media companies behind the group are happy with the results. “Our members are pleased that the overwhelming majority of owners, operators, and developers of sites, add-ons, and services that facilitate copyright theft voluntarily comply with copyright law upon contact with ACE representatives,” VanOrnum tells us. “We will execute more planned global actions along these lines and look to continue our success protecting creators around the world,” he adds. If a cease and desist order is ignored, legal action remains an option. While ACE hasn’t shied away from that in the past, it aims to address issues out of court where possible. Cease and desist letters are only part of its strategy though. ACE also seeks cooperation from many other players in the ecosystem, including advertising networks, payment processors, cyberlockers, domain name registrars and registries, search engines, online marketplaces, and social media services, to name a few. ACE hopes to promote legally available content while addressing illegal add-ons and streaming boxes. However, it also has its eyes set on other streaming services, including apps and websites. “We are continuously reviewing our strategy and will consider new outreach and enforcement efforts where appropriate,” VanOrnum tells us, again, without giving away any concrete targets. The group does explain that it has a comprehensive “piracy reduction plan” which tries to incorporate all the major streaming threats. While the early signs suggest that this plan is paying off, work is far from done yet. New investigations are being launched on a regular basis, which means that the cease and desist letter Hydra9 received, was certainly not the last. View Original Article. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the global anti-piracy coalition which includes the major Hollywood studios, plus Netflix, Amazon and others, is keeping the pressure on. The group recently managed to shut down another group of Kodi add-ons and builds. According to ACE, this is part of a broader "piracy reduction plan," which is starting to pay off. During the summer of 2017, several of the largest entertainment industry companies in the world teamed up to create a new anti-piracy coalition. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) brought together well-known Hollywood outfits including Disney, Warner Bros, NBCUniversal, media giants such as Sky and BBC, as well as the streaming-based newcomers Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu. This is without a doubt one of the most prominent copyright enforcement groups in history and one with a clear mission. ACE wants to bring a halt to all forms of piracy but with a specific focus on online streaming, which it sees as a major threat to its industry. The organization has filed several lawsuits in the US, for example, targeting vendors of pirate streaming boxes. This has been quite effective so far, with Dragon Box settling for $14.5 million TickBox TV agreeing to pay $25 million in damages. However, behind the scenes, there have been many less visible enforcement efforts as well. ACE regularly reaches out to developers who create ‘add-ons’ and ‘builds’ that are specifically designed to access pirated content through streaming boxes, including those running Kodi. These efforts are not made public by ACE, but the targeted developers sometimes speak about them in public. Last week, for example, when the Hydra9 repository was targeted, among others. “Some in the community got served ACE letters yesterday, including myself. My letter specifically mentions most of my builds, and the Hydra9 repo,” developer ‘Terror’ informed people on Telegram, sharing a cease and desist letter. “I have made so many friends in this community and the Hydra9 team has been the highlight of my time making builds. I will likely continue as a skinner/teacher only, after I’m done dealing with ACE,” he added. The letter in question is similar to those that have gone out to many other developers since 2017. As can be seen below, it comes with a rather impressive list of logos from entertainment industry companies, to which Discovery Inc., Channel 5, and Telefe have yet to be added. It appears that these efforts have been quite successful but thus far ACE hasn’t said much about them in public. To find out more, we asked the organization whether it could share any data on how many of these requests it has sent out over the past two years. While we didn’t get any exact figures from ACE, which clearly doesn’t want to give away too much, the group said that a “significant” number of developers and site operators cooperated after being notified. “ACE has sought and obtained voluntary cooperation from a significant number of owners, operators, and developers of sites, add-ons, and services that facilitate piracy,” ACE spokesperson Richard VanOrnum told us. ACE targets people throughout the world and says it prioritizes voluntary measures over lawsuits. Through these efforts, it hopes to boost the legal market. Thus far, the media companies behind the group are happy with the results. “Our members are pleased that the overwhelming majority of owners, operators, and developers of sites, add-ons, and services that facilitate copyright theft voluntarily comply with copyright law upon contact with ACE representatives,” VanOrnum tells us. “We will execute more planned global actions along these lines and look to continue our success protecting creators around the world,” he adds. If a cease and desist order is ignored, legal action remains an option. While ACE hasn’t shied away from that in the past, it aims to address issues out of court where possible. Cease and desist letters are only part of its strategy though. ACE also seeks cooperation from many other players in the ecosystem, including advertising networks, payment processors, cyberlockers, domain name registrars and registries, search engines, online marketplaces, and social media services, to name a few. ACE hopes to promote legally available content while addressing illegal add-ons and streaming boxes. However, it also has its eyes set on other streaming services, including apps and websites. “We are continuously reviewing our strategy and will consider new outreach and enforcement efforts where appropriate,” VanOrnum tells us, again, without giving away any concrete targets. The group does explain that it has a comprehensive “piracy reduction plan” which tries to incorporate all the major streaming threats. While the early signs suggest that this plan is paying off, work is far from done yet. New investigations are being launched on a regular basis, which means that the cease and desist letter Hydra9 received, was certainly not the last.
steven36 Posted April 23, 2019 Share Posted April 23, 2019 They think the made a difference closing those pre loaded box sellers down? They just made the earth a little greener by removing that trash off the internet! Kodi boxes are no good unless you maintain them yourself.All addons die they change repos or the addon dev is force to quit or retires because there no money in making addons only the portals like TVA made money from ads for a short while tell Dish Network and Bell Canada shut them down and they deserved it too because they was taking advantage of DEVs and open source. If you bought a Tick Box are any preloaded box you got ripped off because kodi is free and open source . . here is a comment about Tick Box before they got sued. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "hypeiv said: 11:00a, 3/16/17 I won't sugar-coat it... it won't work, or if it does it will only work for a short time. These tv boxes are $40 android boxes loaded with kodi and an app that links to pirate streams. The streams eventually get shut down and the app has to be update to load new streams. Without knowing what app is being used you have no idea if they just stop updating it one day. So more than likely someone tech savvy will have to update the box. If you don't mind pirating, you are better off buying the box yourself and installing the app rather than paying an inflated price for someone else to install it for you. The second problem is bandwidth. HD video will need at a minimum 2megabit a second sustained and probably at least 4-8megmit for a stead stream. At 1.5megabit a second (which is a conservative guess depending on the codec being use) you will be using ~11.25 megabytes a minute or 0.675GB an hour. Looking at wildblues webpage they say 30GB of "priority data" for their most expensive plan, and I am guessing it will slow down after that. at 1.5 megabits a second he will hit his 30gig "priority data" after 45 hours or 90 minutes of TV a day. If the streams he connects to are higher bit rate he will burn through that data much faster." _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Why are they talking about Tick Box a year latter? I would never knew they existed if ACE would not shut them down . At lest with kodi i have and addon were i can add the streams to my download i want to watch from filehost or torrent i can add links from own sources at the quality i know my internet can handle but 90% of the time i just download the file and watch it with SMPlayer .Kodi is a pain in butt because you have stay on top of everything to keep it running good. it's not worth the work when you can download a file and watch it few minutes latter with little are no effort. ACE is not wining people are going back to downloading it was a phase tell they see how much work it is. They still plenty of Addons if you want to use it . New addons get released everyday because a sucker is born every minute. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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