Facebook Bans Ads for Kodi Boxes Because Pirates Are Ruining Everything
Facebook banned all ads for Kodi boxes this week, the latest in a long run of similar crackdowns.
A line added to Facebook’s commerce policies this week specifically bans “Promoting the sale or use of streaming devices with Kodi installed,” though the policy does allow the sale of remote controls and keyboards that support the app.
We’ve been over this a few times: Kodi is not a piracy application. It’s an open source video player that happens to support add-ons, and a few third party developers happen to make add-ons for pirating TV shows and movies. Another group of people and companies sell “fully loaded” Kodi boxes, which are basically small computers with Kodi installed alongside a bunch of piracy add-ons.
Kodi’s developers argue that these piracy boxes are killing Kodi, and news like this sure seems to support that claim.
And this isn’t the first time Kodi’s reputation for piracy has hurt the project. Google no longer auto-completes questions about Kodi, for example, and Amazon banned the application from their app stores last year. So Facebook’s move is just the latest in a run of similar bans. It’s sad, but there’s not much Kodi can do at this point. The pirates are ruining a nice thing.
Our thanks to Luke Bouma at Cord Cutters news for pointing this story out to us.
Photo credit: Syafiq Adnann/Shutterstock.com
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