![]() “The most common use of is development purposes.” “In the same way that a journalist these days is probably a blogger before they’re a journalist, people want a place where they can write stuff,” Keith Herrington, an XBMC Foundation board member, told me over the phone. But there are also unofficial repositories with their own policies, such as TVAddons. The XBMC Foundation, which maintains Kodi, verifies any addons to its official repository to ensure no piracy products make it onto the platform. In June 2016, Rogers, Bell, Videotron, and TVA (the same companies suing Lackman) sued five sellers of fully loaded Kodi boxes and as part of the ongoing case obtained a court order banning them from selling the devices. Because of this, pirates sell “fully loaded” Kodi boxes decked out with apps specifically designed to illegally stream video from copyrighted sources, making them a target for litigious rights holders. Kodi is explicitly meant to stream legal sources of video online, but due to its open-source nature, the platform can also be used to illegally access copyrighted video. Lackman ran TVAddons, a website that hosted unofficial apps (referred to as “addons”) for Kodi, a popular open-source media center that allows users to stream media from their devices and over the internet. Geist cautions every upstart entrepreneur of the “sledgehammer” approach taken by telecoms in shutting Lackman down. “Telecommunication companies have become much more aggressive across a few vectors when it comes to addressing piracy in Canada very recently,” he told me. Tamir Israel, an intellectual property lawyer in the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), echoed these sentiments. “I would argue that there’s infringing sources and many non-infringing sources, but that’s seen as a threat if you’re trying to sell TV packages.” “Companies like Bell view alternative sources of access to streaming video as a significant competitive threat,” Michael Geist, an internet law professor at the University of Ottawa, told me over the phone. I combed court documents, spoke to Lackman, his lawyer, legal experts, and a lawyer representing the telecom and media companies suing Lackman in order to put together a full picture of what happened to TVAddons-and what it might mean for people and small companies operating in the margins of copyright law. All three have been lobbying the government in various capacities to set up a system for blocking access to piracy sites in Canada, similar to controversial measures undertaken in the UK. Now, Lackman is embroiled in expensive legal proceedings for a case that pits him against several telecom corporations and media companies, ultimately to answer: Was TVAddons a platform for innovative streaming apps, or was it designed to enable piracy?Īccording to legal experts, Lackman’s experience is an outgrowth of a new and hardcore approach to tackling piracy in Canada led by a handful of powerful companies-among them Rogers, Bell, and Quebecor, the parent company for TVA and Vidéotron. That was just the beginning-Lackman’s case still hasn’t gone to trial. Using the login information he handed over, a court-authorized computer technician took TVAddons offline and made its Twitter account with 100,000 followers private, locking Lackman out in the process. The lawyers took Lackman’s laptop to be copied and returned it days later. “This order just allowed them to go through everything my underwear, my socks. “They ransacked the place,” Lackman recalled when I interviewed him in his new Montreal apartment (the move was unconnected to the litigation, he said). He didn’t recognize the names, he told me, and said nothing. They presented him with a list of names of people suspected of being digital pirates in Canada and asked him to snitch. ![]() Lackman, who called a lawyer in to represent him, was questioned for nine hours by the opposing counsel. The team copied laptops, hard drives, and any other devices they found, and demanded logins and passwords. The search was only supposed to go from 8 AM to 8 PM but it ended at midnight. ![]() The crew was there with a civil court order allowing them to search the place. Lackman was told that he was being sued for copyright infringement for operating TVAddons, a website that hosted user-created apps for streaming video over the internet. The other was there to be an independent observer on behalf of the court. One of the lawyers represented some of Canada’s most powerful telecommunications and media companies: Bell, Rogers, Vidéotron, and TVA. Seeing that he wasn’t about to be mugged, the police left. When the police showed up after about 20 minutes, according to Lackman, he opened the door and was met by lawyers, a bailiff, and, rather ominously, a locksmith.
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