Open Source Makes Kodi Add-ons Proliferate -- And Hard To Eradicate

from the welcome-to-the-hydra-effect dept

As Techdirt noted a year ago, the entertainment industry has been trying to convince the authorities around the world that "fully-loaded" Kodi boxes, which allow the viewing of unauthorized video streams, are the devil's spawn, and must be eradicated. That obsession has led to efforts to stop even vanilla Kodi boxes being promoted and sold, despite the fact that the open source software they run is perfectly legal. TorrentFreak has a report about the latest salvo in this war on Kodi, and its interesting consequences.

It concerns a third-party Kodi add-on called "Exodus", which, like many others, allowed unauthorized streaming videos to be viewed with little effort. The excellent design and resulting popularity of Exodus meant that it was soon targeted by copyright companies. The pressure worked, and the development of the add-on was halted, leaving millions of happy users somewhat less happy. But Exodus had an important hidden feature: it was released under an open source license. That meant that anyone could pick up the code and continue its development independently of the original, without needing to ask permission from anyone. As TorrentFreak points out, that is precisely what has happened, and on a surprisingly large scale. The TVAddons site recently published an article that discusses 12 forks of Exodus, which is only part of the Exodus ecosystem: "Too many Exodus forks are out there to investigate them all."

This "hydra" effect -- chop off one head, and two grow in its place -- makes eliminating open-source add-ons for Kodi extremely difficult. Although individual developers may be persuaded to stop working on a particular fork, the code is still out there, and can easily be maintained and improved by others. Since the latter can be anywhere in the world, that makes shutting them down even harder. However, TorrentFreak rightly notes that this doesn't mean that the efforts of the copyright companies are entirely in vain:

the continued efforts from rightsholders to shut down these add-ons may have a more subtle effect. While hardcore pirates will always find a new fork, there's also a group of people who will get frustrated by the repeated shutdowns, and give up eventually.

That's certainly true, but it's not an insurmountable problem. For example, it would be straightforward for developers to create a common standard for key aspects of their add-ons that would allow simple switching between them. That way, once one add-on was shut down, non-technical users could migrate easily to new ones, perhaps even automatically. When the code is open source, there is no problem with proprietary rights being asserted over programming modules or configuration files -- another reason why developers may decide to adopt it when writing Kodi add-ons.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: add-ons, exodus, hydra, kodi, open source

China's Home-Grown Version Of Spotify Shows How To Make Money In A World Of Digital Abundance

from the removing-obstacles dept

The fact that the best-known music streaming service, Spotify, is still struggling to turn a profit despite its huge popularity, is often held up as proof that making money in a world of digital abundance is almost impossible. Of course, here on Techdirt, we've published many posts about people and companies that have adopted various innovative strategies to get around the problem. But what about music streaming as a mass medium: will it ever be possible to make money in this sector?

A fascinating article on Mashable shows that it is already happening, but perhaps not where most people are looking. QQ Music is part of the extensive digital empire of the Chinese giant Tencent, best known for its messaging app WeChat, and now the largest Internet company in Asia. Last year, its turnover was $15.8 billion (pdf). As the Mashable article explains, QQ Music's general manager revealed last week that the service is now profitable. One reason is the sheer scale of Tencent's user base:

As one of China's biggest dotcoms -- WeChat has 762 million active users -- the company has far better negotiating power at the table with record labels. Back in 2014, Tencent already used this to its advantage, striking exclusive Chinese distribution deals with large music producers the likes of Sony, Warner Music and South Korea's YG Entertainment.

Similarly, QQ Music is itself large compared to Spotify:

QQ Music reports 100 million daily active users, and 400 million monthly actives.

Spotify, in comparison, has about 100 million monthly actives, although it has 30 million paying subscribers -- three times QQ's 10 million paying subscribers.

The secret to QQ Music's profitability seems to be the following:

Chinese analyst iResearch estimates that over half of [QQ Music's] users in China would have paid for something on their music apps this year. That could be a one-off purchase like an album or concert tickets, even if it's not an ongoing subscription.

Moreover, beyond the 57% that already buy ancillary items, a further 20% said they were willing to do so at some point. That means over three-quarters of QQ Music's users have or will buy other goods. Crucially, Tencent makes that as easy as possible by offering its own payment system as standard. That emphasizes a key point about making money in a world of digital abundance: success flows from removing as many barriers as possible, so that people can pay you for things they want at the moment they want them.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: abundance, add-ons, business models, china, music industry, streaming
Companies: qq music, spotify, tencent, wechat

Android App Helps You Avoid Supporting SOPA Supporting Companies

from the nicely-done dept

While politicians continue to pretend that SOPA support is a minor issue, there's been more and more evidence that it's a big deal to an awful lot of people. For example, in just the past few weeks, there's been a Chrome add-on to tell you when you're browsing a site from a company that supports SOPA, as well as an Android app that will do the same thing via physical barcodes, to help people avoid buying products from companies who support SOPA. But, I'm sure the public doesn't really care about the law at all...

Filed Under: add-ons, apps, extensions, pipa, protect ip, sopa

Make Some Software Better, Get Arrested For Copyright Infringement

from the the-spirit-of-innovation dept

If you look into the history of innovation, you realize that it's all built on the works of those who came before. The single biggest key to innovation is to try to do something better than what's already been done. There's a great book by Robert Friedel that highlights this called A Culture of Improvement. This is seen quite a lot in the software world, certainly. In fact, it's quite common for people to try to improve someone else's software, just to make it better. Take, for example, the massive success of Greasemonkey scripts to allow people to improve on others' websites. However, in this age of pervasive misunderstandings about the purpose of intellectual property laws, many people take offense to the idea that someone wants to improve their work, as we've seen in cases where people have tried to build better front-ends for confusingly designed websites. It gets even trickier when it comes to "improvements" that conflict with business models. There are still some people who think that Firefox's AdBlock extension is "stealing," for example. And, remember, that the folks behind Kazaa flipped out about Kazaa Lite, a version of their software, which stripped out all the spyware included with Kazaa. These all seem to fall under the heading of "felony interference with a business model" which is the concept formerly called "competition."

Now a similar case has appeared in China, but with more dire results. There's apparently a very popular instant messaging client called QQ, from a company named Tencent, that has a few annoying characteristics. A computer scientist in China created a modified version called Coral QQ that got rid of some of those problems, including adding some features that Tencent charges for. For doing so, the guy was recently arrested for intellectual property violations. The company has been fighting with him for years, previously having filed and won a copyright infringement case against him (for which he paid the fine). However, as his software kept getting more and more popular, rather than taking it as a message that perhaps the company should improve QQ and get rid of annoying features, Tencent instead filed charges with the police, who arrested the programmer. As the folks at Against Monopoly point out, this is yet another situation where the concept of intellectual property is being used to hold back innovation (and put someone in jail for improving a product).

Filed Under: add-ons, china, copyright infringement, innovation, software