Recently an announcement from the UK Intellectual Property Office noted that online privacy in the UK remains stable, largely in part to “illicitly adapted set-top boxes” such as Kodi boxes. The UK worries that as more and more users start using Kodi boxes to stream illegally gained content, that it could undermine progress made by anti-piracy services like Netflix and Spotify–which give users incentive to pay to access large content libraries without the need to pirate content.
According to the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) roughly 7 million Brits are guilty of online piracy. 13 percent of privacy users are using set-top boxes like Kodi boxes to get their “fill” of piracy. According to the Telegraph, movies and music are becoming less attractive to pirates, but shows on platforms outside of Netflix like HBO shows or other shows unavailable are still commonly pirated. 16 percent of pirates stream TV shows through Kodi and 17 percent use services like Putlocker.
Right now in the UK, if you are caught torrenting with websites like ThePirateBay without a VPN to protect you, you will get an email describing what you did wrong. However, Kodi boxes are starting to get more users and are thus starting to get more negative attention. There have even been criminal cases targeting sellers that sell kodi boxes that are “fully loaded” which means Kodi boxes that have pre-loaded access to pirated content. Additionally, even the UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft has threatened to start hunting down and tracking Kodi box users individually, not just the sellers.
While Kodi is the platform for unauthorized third-party plugins, it’s not necessarily the “bad actor”. Kodi is a powerful platform designed to be open source to work as a media service to visualize and navigate video, music, and even game collections. It’s free and made by volunteers.
However, if you do want to use third party plugins in the UK with Kodi, you should only do so with a VPN like TorGuard. The best way to do so would be to use TorGuard in conjunction with their company sold VPN Routers. By connecting your Kodi to a VPN router, all of your information is encrypted and secure.
