Piracy! XBMC Unveils Official Stance Opens Door For XBMC HUB

Piracy, thats a word we are going to be hearing even more about in 2012. This morning XBMC announced their official stance on piracy. This thorny topic has been brewing all week and is still being discussed with passion in the “draft” thread that appeared on the forum last weekend. Timed almost perfectly with SOPA and on the back of a domain registrar change. It would seem that XBMC is trying to distance itself from some of the content that has been created by third party’s. Understandable really. We believe that they (XBMC) are setup as a foundation/charity with it’s base in Delaware, good ole U.S. of A which probably isn’t good business if you are harbouring a bunch of freetards.With the MPAA secretly drawing up plans for the mandatory public flogging of suspected terrorists sharing the latest blockbuster remake of an 80′s classic. It’s seems inevitable that XBMC have had to attempt to draw a line in the sand.

At the moment the new piracy policy seems to be aimed squarely at a hardcore of video addon’s such as Icefilms, Icelibrary, Fastpasstv T3, Navi-X, Live Streams and Sportsdevil. However from this commentators point of view, like SOPA, it’s all a bit vague. As I am sure it covers others such as videodevil, nzbs.org streamer etc. I mean the list goes on and the closer you look at it as we move into 2012 all it takes is one jumped up lawyer, a hand full of screenshots of bluray cases and boom you’ve got a shitstorm waiting about to go off in your face.

Which I guess leads us onto XBMC HUB. A new fan forum and home to some of these naughty rogue lines of code. Abrasher has taken it onto himself to fill the gap now left open by xbmc.org by creating the hub. Having gained support from Batch and eldorado of icefilms fame, these addons now have far more scope for support and news than their one thread counterparts on the official site. We fully support Abrasher’s efforts and are trying to help as best we can. So any future reporting for the “banned list” will be coming from there. You can also hook up with Lefty and myself for a cosy chat. Of course this new fan site hasn’t gone unnoticed by the community. There hass been some hostility toward the project. We think, taking the wider view that is probably a good thing in the long run. It takes the heat away from the XBMC team (should it arise) and it also gives addon developers (should they want it) a home that will showcase their work a bit more prominently than maybe the team at XBMC are able to do. We just hope that the guys at XBMC don’t loose their way and start wielding the ban hammer at the hint of a potential copyright issue that could maybe cause a problem to someone, sometime, somewhere.