This is standard operating procedure for Google, and presumably all other major search engines. They apply the same filtering to other "objectionable" content and are the sole arbitrators of what fits this definition. How is this news? Is there some other way to solve the very real problem that Google is addressing?
Is there a list of software that search engines won't autocomplete? Bing and DDG gave useful autocompletes when I searched for Kodi, XBMC (still works in Google too), bittorrent, DeCSS, popcorntime, etc.
You could always support other search engines -- but as the former CTO of blekko, I'm not going to ever ship an autocomplete that by default returns nasty stuff for [blacks are] or [why do blacks] or a large number of other phrases which produce terrible, terrible autocomplete results.
Yeah, that was my point. Why would google have autocomplete options that give them a bad image? Why should anyone other than google decide what a good image is?
Ah, I misunderstood your point. Yes, it's an editorial thing, and even as a personal fan of unfiltered results, I can't bring myself to ship horrific autocomplete suggestions.
Unfortunately the existence of an autocomplete filtering system does lead to increased pressure to use it for more than just racism and porn.
>Google has banned the term “Kodi” from its autocomplete feature, meaning those who look for information on the set-top box will have to type out the full term in order to search, as reported by TorrentFreak.
>While Kodi is a legal set-top box for streaming, it supports a myriad of third-party add-ons that provide access to pirated media.
Kodi is not a "set-top box". Kodi is software. A set-top box might be pre-loaded with Kodi, but it is not Kodi, anymore than a phone is an "Android". As far as I'm aware, the Kodi team doesn't even sell or officially endorse any pre-loaded hardware set-top box.
This sort of mangling is disappointing from a tech-focused news outlet like The Verge. It also reinforces the implicit association between Kodi and piracy, which is the very thing that caused Google to remove Kodi from search results in the first place.
> This sort of mangling is disappointing from a tech-focused news outlet like The Verge. It also reinforces the implicit association between Kodi and piracy, which is the very thing that caused Google to remove Kodi from search results in the first place.
This sort of mangling is exactly how exaggerated misrepresented news gets spread. Google didn't remove Kodi from their search results. You can type Kodi and it's the first thing that pops up.
You can type home theater software and get Kodi in the search results, or open source media player and get Kodi.
All they did is remove Kodi from being autocompleted. It still even comes up for autosuggestion.
Right, but... imo google can fuck right off. I’m really not sure who wants corporate interests nudging them like this.
Google is allowed to curate thisr autocomplete to remove links to 6degree piracy topics, and even promote a candidate by removing negative results like they did for Clinton - and I’m allowed to consider them actually-evil for doing so.
Yep. Previously it seemed like they valued their search's integrity over everything else, but they must be so comfortable with their power now that they're not really worried anymore. It's not easy to prove either, so hard to regulate.
I wish we could forbid it and it might be something the EU may try in the next few years, but it'd likely involve an external audit of the holiest systems - something they would likely fight against hard.
What individual users can do in the mean time is using independent, less corporate services: DuckDuckGo comes to mind.
It is however hard to ignore that Google really has a monopoly on good search (well, decliningly so for me). Maybe we should also start to use Bing to fuel competition.
Isn’t it funny that Google has likely been one of the biggest beneficiaries of illegal content on the internet? Just think how many YT and Google searches end with “full movie” or “torrent.”
I feel so bad for the Kodi project. They've done amazing work over the years and their reputation is being destroyed so quickly by people taking their open source work, adding a bunch of piracy addons, and selling a set top box.
I have no idea what they can do to combat this. I don't see how they can distance themselves from this any more than they have.
Equally sad as the existence of the terrible Kodi piracy boxes is that the legitimate set top box/"smart TV" industry is completely ignoring it. I'm not aware of any TV manufacturer building Kodi into their product, instead they invent their own junk, which is usually much worse.
Does anyone know why the consumer electronics industry is ignoring Kodi?
> Does anyone know why the consumer electronics industry is ignoring Kodi?
I really don't think the audience for Kodi is that big. It requires you to have DRM-less, local copies of any TV or movie you want to watch, and how many people - legally - have that? Not many. I know because I'm one of those people, and use Plex, despite its faults.
Also, last I used Kodi it was one (very big) codebase. Plex is split out into server components and client apps, which is essential for Smart TV usage. You're never going to get a full instance of Kodi running on a Roku box, you'll need some kind of client that connects to a remote server holding all your videos. There's nothing stopping the Kodi team from making that Roku app, incidentally.
What I was thinking of is using Kodi as the base for an open smart TV platform. It already has good integration of live broadcast TV (including EPG etc) and many add-ons for streaming services. Of course, to make consumers happy, there needs to be a way to support DRM, otherwise there won't be Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. But Kodi announced last year that they're discussing about allowing DRM add-ons to talk with the application: https://kodi.tv/article/dev-journal-kodi-and-drm
Unless Kodi has changed substantially, even though it exposes an interface for live TV, it provides no mechanism for tuning, capturing a stream, or writing it to disc/DVR. That’s all passed off to a third-party backend like MythTV.
>> I really don't think the audience for Kodi is that big. It requires you to have DRM-less, local copies of any TV or movie you want to watch, and how many people - legally - have that?
This is partially true. While all the "questionable" boxes come with pre-installed plugins connect to servers that restream copyrighted content (including live content), there are also plugins that connect to legit content streamers as well.
Even that is ok.
I even found a App that used Ghostscript that way (a bigger one) And the Ghostscript guys said it's ok. You can basically just replace the Transcoder with newer versions by just putting a new dll/exe there, which makes it gpl compliant.
The original Xbox was way ahead of the other media centers I knew of at the time (2004-2010,roughly):
* CD/DVD player
* upgradeable HDD
* 1080i output (though I mostly used RCA connectors, and I don't think you can decode 720p+ with it)
* quite cheap compared to a fully fledged computer
* trough XBMC, integrated games library management, with native and emulated titles
* and of course, the plethora of add-ons and protocols Kodi supports to this day
And though it was big and heavy, it had an integrated PSU.
This was before raspberry pi was a thing, mind you. The alternatives were expensive (~€200) hard disk enclosures that couldn't do a fourth of this. I would have kept on using if it wasn't for its inability to cope with HD formats, and wouldn't be surprised to learn that it helped to promote the console quite a bit.
Plex took an existing project available for use under license and modified it into a proprietary branch. If you have ever studied the history of Unix you will realize that this is extremely common. If you take an existing invention and improve it, its a new invention.
The company I work for creates STB software, and while we do use a large number of open source components the message from above is to avoid GPL where possible. Any use of GPLv2 must be signed off after review, GPLv3 is simply banned.
Unfortunately most companies in the sector, from hardware manufacturers to integrators, have equivalent, if not worse open-source policies. They are willing to take the hard work of others where it will accelerate development, but view sharing back as a loss of control and competitive advantage.
This is in part due to pressure from operators and content providers, who are very fearful of losing control over distribution and tend to view anything open with deep suspicion.
> but view sharing back as a loss of control and competitive advantage.
I’ve never understood this mentality (disclaimer: I’ve worked on set top box software). The competitive concern would only be valid if the company’s closed source software was any good. Every closed source set top box software I’ve ever seen was beyond awful, at least compared to open source alternatives. Who on earth would gain any competitive advantage from even looking at the code, let alone using it in a competing product?
I thought about having the software auto auto-rebrand itself when a non authorized addon is installed. It's a pain I know, now kodi addon developers need to sign addons. But I'm sure they can automate it somehow.
Require addons and kodi itself not to hardcode the Kodi name/brand (even in logos/addons titles, etc.), if an unauthorized addon is installed kodi replaces all the kodi brand with a generic name, the harder to google the better, something like "Media Player" sounds generic enough.
But I'm sure these box sellers would just "create" custom skins/addons and put the kodi brand there just to spite the developers.
So the main[1] reason they changed the name was because they "have never had any sort of legal control over the use of its name". Clearly, based on the issue at hand, the name change hasn't helped.
[1] I don't buy that they needed to change the name because "XBMC" didn't make sense anymore. "Kodi" is just as nonsensical as "XBMC", if not more so.
> Google omitting from auto-complete isn't relevant.
I disagree. They wanted legal control of their name, yet now they have it and Google considers it a piracy search term. Microsoft speculation aside, they didn't gain anything because pirate-box makers don't care about legal action to begin with.
I don't know if they could somehow enforce autocompletion legally, but they probably could've prevented the reason Google is dropping them: With legal control of the name they could have sued people selling piracy boxes. A headache, yes, but it seems that that was exactly why they did change the name (Though it also improves recognizability, imo)
Kodi wasn't able to run Kodi18 on the Xbox One unless they rebranded. Furthermore, while they technically have more control over their trademark now, they dabble in the business of piracy so good luck with enforcing that on the limited budget they have. Frankly, I think they were sick of being under the Xbox shadow as it was holding back their branding
Dell, HP, and Apple all manufacture devices (laptops) used extensively, even primarily by many, for pirating movies and games, and even facilitate the piracy of games on other platforms (console flash carts etc).
I don't think Kodi's reputation should suffer any more than Apple's does, but at the same time, I know that it will.
Kodi pirates did not destroy their reputation. Every semi-open platform has pirate users. Those that created piracy boxes and put the kodi logo right next to pirate services and legit services that addons enabled the piracy of probably contributed though. But most, if not all these boxes run kodi on top of Android, and their reputation hasn't been sullied from this.
I think Kodi could partially mitigate this issue by selling clean kodi boxes. I still don't know where I can buy one.
Not sure what your point is here. Google went to-the-max apeshit insane in their censoring/blocking of gun-related product searches recently, to the point that Google Products search wouldn't return anything labelled with the color burgundy. Surely Google thinks gun manufacturers are so intensely bad as to have 'punished' them via search controls Far, far more than they have here with Kodi.
Aside: Neither of these seems like useful exercises for Google.
"armalite" auto completes and even helpfully suggest the AR15, the exact weapon used in all the most spectacular massacres.
I'm not suggesting Google interfere with either. I'm suggesting copyright forces have an unreasonable amount of clout, much of it invisible. More even than a mass movement against school massacres.
Try searching for "shopping" results for "ar15", "armalite 15", and "ak47". It will show they have explicitly filtered out "ar15" shopping search results
Lol and so? If school shooters had used ak47's, which fire a larger caliber bullet, are extremely available, have higher capacity magazines and will never breakdown. No one would give the slightest fuck, because everyone already knows bad guys use ak's. American's just have their panties.in a knot because the good guy guns are being used by bad guys. Hell you can go buy a semi automatic shotgun with a big enough clip that would leave a classroom splattered with nothing but pieces of children....but yeah....ar15's...Lol.
Google prohibited gun-related sales since 2012. The "burgundy" incident followed the Parkland shooting where 17 were murdered, it was a mistake quickly rectified.
Many sites changed their policies regarding guns in anticipation of the changes to Section 230.
No, unlike gun owners and manufacturers, software developers have no effective lobbying organization and get treated liked 2nd class citizens. No one fears angering software developers before an election.
I think your reversing that, as the customers are out front. That's the mistake that keeps getting made by the NRA's opponents. The NRA is only effective because its people over industry. Industry-lead groups need a whole lot more funding to be effective.
Any software developer that is looking for leadership from the software industry is going to be very disappointed. Often, the industry doesn't really have the best instance of developers in mind.
While that certainly does factor in, it normally just means that it takes longer for it to change. And well, people have been murdered with guns for centuries already, so I think those would cancel each other out.
The vast majority of use cases of Kodi would be covered by the 1st amendment.
In recent decades even the most frivolous copyright claims supersedes the 1st amendment in the eyes of both the courts and corporations. I imagine if they were invented today, the xerox, tape-recorder or printing-press would have a very hard time.
But you are right, consumers and technologist have near zero clout.
Whether one agrees or not, Google is within their rights to remove Kodi from their autocomplete product.
Whether one agrees or not, Dick's Sporting Goods is within their rights to remove partial/all (can't remember what they did exactly, honestly) gun sales.
So they're not really all that different. Kodi isn't considered culpable for people using it in a bad way here, just Google is removing it from autocomplete in a precautionary manner. Likewise, guns and Dick's.
I think that they clearly aren't conflating the two. "Whether one agrees or not" is "Regardless of whether you consider Google's/Dick's actions moral".
The question was why gun manufacturers aren't legally accountable for crimes committed with their products while software developers are.
The (paraphrased) answer provided is "They aren't; Google removing Kodi from autocomplete is similar to sporting goods stores removing guns from sale".
The Kodi project is not legally accountable for civil infringement committed with their devices for the same reason that gun manufacturers aren’t. Because both have legal purposes. The fact that people do illegal things with them is not the manufacturer’s fault in this case.
In the US, tort law defines manufacturer liability and there is no negligence or design defect.
There are manufacturers who solely make piracy boxes running Kodi who are frequently charged (https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/25/kodi-box-guilty-reversal...). And if gun manufacturers marketed a device with a primary purpose of murder they would likely be charged.
In business law class, we had a case about a switchblade manufacturer adding features only useful for stabbing people. But I can’t find a real reference on Google.
Google's talking about piracy, everyone else is talking about privacy.
Google can do whatever they want to please their masters within the industry on the piracy front. I moved to DuckDuckGo years ago. If I want to check Google results I get them through the Startpage bang.
Google & Facebook belong in the same category of no-go, invasive privacy offenders. Which is piracy in my book. Hopefully their next preventative measure in that regard is to remove google.com.
In a similar vein, Amazon refused to publish an Alexa skill I wrote to control Kodi (basically a voice remote). They cited piracy as the only reason. When I'd press them on why they allowed one for Plex since they are both just video players, they would just refuse to acknowledge the question and deny me again.
It's their right to do so, but it's stupid and defies logic.
That is frankly one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. I have used Kodi since it was XBMC. And MAYBE back in the day when you had to break DMCA section 1201 to install it on an original Xbox then you could have argued there was something questionable about it. But now it's just a general media player that looks good on a TV.
I am sure this is a total coincidence that the ability of Chrome to cast local files was showed off literally yesterday, and they seek and destroy the competitor that makes Chromecasting look like a cavemans solution the following.
> You can't ban software makers for the illegal use of their software by users when your own users and services are the same..
The sad thing is that yes - they can, and yes - they do. And there's little we can do to stop them from doing that, apart from raising concerns and stopping using their service.
But results for "Kodi" haven't been removed. Autocompletion when you type "kod" or "ko" has. I'm trying to think of a non-disruptive way to pop up "we would have completed this term with 'kodi' but oh hey nevermind you went on to type 'koala'" and I'm failing.
Google should still show the autocomplete results, but in a different color! Blue for when your query makes them sad, red for when your query has angered them and green when you're looking for information so upsetting they'll turn into the Incredible Hulk.
At what point do filtering or targeted omissions become considered anti-competitive practices? It is one thing for a government to issue and companies to uphold gags because governments are not in competition.
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Unfortunately the existence of an autocomplete filtering system does lead to increased pressure to use it for more than just racism and porn.
>While Kodi is a legal set-top box for streaming, it supports a myriad of third-party add-ons that provide access to pirated media.
Kodi is not a "set-top box". Kodi is software. A set-top box might be pre-loaded with Kodi, but it is not Kodi, anymore than a phone is an "Android". As far as I'm aware, the Kodi team doesn't even sell or officially endorse any pre-loaded hardware set-top box.
This sort of mangling is disappointing from a tech-focused news outlet like The Verge. It also reinforces the implicit association between Kodi and piracy, which is the very thing that caused Google to remove Kodi from search results in the first place.
This sort of mangling is exactly how exaggerated misrepresented news gets spread. Google didn't remove Kodi from their search results. You can type Kodi and it's the first thing that pops up.
You can type home theater software and get Kodi in the search results, or open source media player and get Kodi.
All they did is remove Kodi from being autocompleted. It still even comes up for autosuggestion.
Google is allowed to curate thisr autocomplete to remove links to 6degree piracy topics, and even promote a candidate by removing negative results like they did for Clinton - and I’m allowed to consider them actually-evil for doing so.
What individual users can do in the mean time is using independent, less corporate services: DuckDuckGo comes to mind.
It is however hard to ignore that Google really has a monopoly on good search (well, decliningly so for me). Maybe we should also start to use Bing to fuel competition.
The irony is that Google has made far more money off of "piracy" than Kodi.
The sad thing is that a certain select set of companies gets special privileges while open source endeavors like Kodi get shafted.
If Kodi had a lot of private consumer data to trade for legal immunities it would be a different story.
They issued a correction:
Correction March 30th, 2018, 1:20AM ET: Article updated to be clear that Kodi is software sometimes loaded onto set-top-boxes, not a set-top box.
Also this is the original source article that The Verge have re-heated:
https://torrentfreak.com/google-adds-kodi-to-autocomplete-pi...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/google-demotes-chr...
I have no idea what they can do to combat this. I don't see how they can distance themselves from this any more than they have.
Does anyone know why the consumer electronics industry is ignoring Kodi?
I really don't think the audience for Kodi is that big. It requires you to have DRM-less, local copies of any TV or movie you want to watch, and how many people - legally - have that? Not many. I know because I'm one of those people, and use Plex, despite its faults.
Also, last I used Kodi it was one (very big) codebase. Plex is split out into server components and client apps, which is essential for Smart TV usage. You're never going to get a full instance of Kodi running on a Roku box, you'll need some kind of client that connects to a remote server holding all your videos. There's nothing stopping the Kodi team from making that Roku app, incidentally.
This is partially true. While all the "questionable" boxes come with pre-installed plugins connect to servers that restream copyrighted content (including live content), there are also plugins that connect to legit content streamers as well.
To boot, Plex began as a fork of XBMC (Kodi's name at the time). Which, given Kodi's GPLv2 license, probably puts Plex out of compliance.
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/141186/possible-gpl-violat...
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/141186/possible-gpl-violat...
Ah, XBMC... I still have an original Xbox that I modded to specifically run XBMC collecting dust in my spare room. It definitely has come a long way.
And though it was big and heavy, it had an integrated PSU.
This was before raspberry pi was a thing, mind you. The alternatives were expensive (~€200) hard disk enclosures that couldn't do a fourth of this. I would have kept on using if it wasn't for its inability to cope with HD formats, and wouldn't be surprised to learn that it helped to promote the console quite a bit.
It was noisy as hell (from the fan) too.
The fact that know one even remember it besides me seems to point out why not a lot of others have followed.
Unfortunately most companies in the sector, from hardware manufacturers to integrators, have equivalent, if not worse open-source policies. They are willing to take the hard work of others where it will accelerate development, but view sharing back as a loss of control and competitive advantage.
This is in part due to pressure from operators and content providers, who are very fearful of losing control over distribution and tend to view anything open with deep suspicion.
I’ve never understood this mentality (disclaimer: I’ve worked on set top box software). The competitive concern would only be valid if the company’s closed source software was any good. Every closed source set top box software I’ve ever seen was beyond awful, at least compared to open source alternatives. Who on earth would gain any competitive advantage from even looking at the code, let alone using it in a competing product?
They don't have a business model and product that is designed to spy on their customers, which makes them a turd in the toilet bowl.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Require addons and kodi itself not to hardcode the Kodi name/brand (even in logos/addons titles, etc.), if an unauthorized addon is installed kodi replaces all the kodi brand with a generic name, the harder to google the better, something like "Media Player" sounds generic enough.
But I'm sure these box sellers would just "create" custom skins/addons and put the kodi brand there just to spite the developers.
https://kodi.tv/article/xbmc-getting-new-name-introducing-ko...
[1] I don't buy that they needed to change the name because "XBMC" didn't make sense anymore. "Kodi" is just as nonsensical as "XBMC", if not more so.
They were only referring to ability to sue over misuse (say I make a KodiBox and sell it). Google omitting from auto-complete isn't relevant.
I think main reason wasn't that however, but was to prevent legal activity from Microsoft. (I suspect there were undisclosed related conversations)
I disagree. They wanted legal control of their name, yet now they have it and Google considers it a piracy search term. Microsoft speculation aside, they didn't gain anything because pirate-box makers don't care about legal action to begin with.
I don't think Kodi's reputation should suffer any more than Apple's does, but at the same time, I know that it will.
I think Kodi could partially mitigate this issue by selling clean kodi boxes. I still don't know where I can buy one.
Is it that copyright violation is such a "heinous" crime that special rules apply?
Aside: Neither of these seems like useful exercises for Google.
I'm not suggesting Google interfere with either. I'm suggesting copyright forces have an unreasonable amount of clout, much of it invisible. More even than a mass movement against school massacres.
Many sites changed their policies regarding guns in anticipation of the changes to Section 230.
They just haven't been clever enough to organize their own customers, or some other mass front, politically the way the gun industry has.
Any software developer that is looking for leadership from the software industry is going to be very disappointed. Often, the industry doesn't really have the best instance of developers in mind.
In recent decades even the most frivolous copyright claims supersedes the 1st amendment in the eyes of both the courts and corporations. I imagine if they were invented today, the xerox, tape-recorder or printing-press would have a very hard time.
But you are right, consumers and technologist have near zero clout.
Whether one agrees or not, Dick's Sporting Goods is within their rights to remove partial/all (can't remember what they did exactly, honestly) gun sales.
So they're not really all that different. Kodi isn't considered culpable for people using it in a bad way here, just Google is removing it from autocomplete in a precautionary manner. Likewise, guns and Dick's.
The question was why gun manufacturers aren't legally accountable for crimes committed with their products while software developers are.
The (paraphrased) answer provided is "They aren't; Google removing Kodi from autocomplete is similar to sporting goods stores removing guns from sale".
In the US, tort law defines manufacturer liability and there is no negligence or design defect.
There are manufacturers who solely make piracy boxes running Kodi who are frequently charged (https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/25/kodi-box-guilty-reversal...). And if gun manufacturers marketed a device with a primary purpose of murder they would likely be charged.
In business law class, we had a case about a switchblade manufacturer adding features only useful for stabbing people. But I can’t find a real reference on Google.
Link- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_liability
Google can do whatever they want to please their masters within the industry on the piracy front. I moved to DuckDuckGo years ago. If I want to check Google results I get them through the Startpage bang.
Google & Facebook belong in the same category of no-go, invasive privacy offenders. Which is piracy in my book. Hopefully their next preventative measure in that regard is to remove google.com.
Example; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)
All links there =) Anytime official site changes, this pages updated.
Wikipedia is your Search Engine, when Google fails.
It's their right to do so, but it's stupid and defies logic.
I am sure this is a total coincidence that the ability of Chrome to cast local files was showed off literally yesterday, and they seek and destroy the competitor that makes Chromecasting look like a cavemans solution the following.
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Since the beginning, our goal has been to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible.
Not just for some. For everyone.
To decrement something would appear to be contrary to making it universally accessible.
You can't ban software makers for the illegal use of their software by users when your own users and services are the same...
Why don't they remove "full episode" from YouTube's autocomplete? (We all know the answer to that one.)
The sad thing is that yes - they can, and yes - they do. And there's little we can do to stop them from doing that, apart from raising concerns and stopping using their service.
Person A: "NO!"
Person B: "YES!"
Someone owns a jingle from 1960 or whatever, they are gonna milk that forever. External effects be damned. They are fucking OWED for LIFE.
Prior to that, it was known as XBMC ("XBox Media Center"). Under that title it's been around since 2003.
But, oh no.. I can't. But nice to hear they can ban what ever they feel is right.
- Duck Duck GO!