Adam Lackman, who describes himself as the “ex-pirate” behind TVAddons, a Kodi add-on library, has agreed to pay a group of Canadian telecom giants $19.5 million in copyright infringement fees, TorrentFreak reports. It is understood that TVAddons was accessible until last week and then went offline forever – it seems.
TVAddons in its heyday was a website that allowed users to upload unofficial addons for Kodi. Kodi is an open-source media library that users can install on streaming devices like Amazon Fire TV Stick and Google Chromecast. While Kodi itself is legitimate software, third-party apps like TVAddons can direct people to pirated content.
A copy of the judgment found that Montreal-based Lackman was “directly or indirectly” involved in the “development, hosting, distribution or promotion of Kodi add-ons that provide users with unauthorized access” to copyrighted content.
Some of Canada’s largest telecommunications providers — including Bell Canada, TVA, Videotron and Rogers — first filed a lawsuit against Lackman in 2017 — even involving a raid on Lackman’s home — as part of a broader crackdown on pirated content.
Around the same time, Lackman was sued by US-based satellite TV provider Dish, alleging copyright infringement. He settled with the company in 2018, which required TVAddons to prioritize Dish’s copyright complaints.
The lawsuit is now officially over and I can get on with my life, Lackman wrote in a tweet. It’s not the outcome I hoped for, but it’s the outcome.
While TVAddons once had a solid fan base — around 40 million monthly active users in 2017 — many expressed dissatisfaction with some of its shady practices. As Kinkead Tech points out, TVAddons sometimes automatically installs Indigo addons, which apparently blocks the use of certain other addons and repositories as well as pushes a nasty VPN service ad when Kodi is opened.
The lawsuit actually touches on this too — it bars Lackman from “engaging in the development, operation, maintenance, update, hosting, proliferation or promotion of or infringing add-ons,” including Indigo and FreeTelly.
Lackman noted in a 2018 interview with Vice that he wants TVAddons to be a hub for legitimate content. Still, Lackman told Vice that he doesn’t really police add-ons uploaded on his site, which inevitably leads to user-generated pirated content.
Apps that accommodate pirated content like TVAddons have given Kodi a reputation for piracy over the years, and many people mistakenly believe that the software is downright illegal. According to data compiled by Comparitech, Google searches for Kodi are actually down, likely due to cases like this one and the European ban on the sale of streaming boxes with pirated software.
Kodi pirates may have jumped ship as legal pressure mounts, but they’ve found a new ship with Plex — the descendant of the Xbox Media Center.