>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.<p>>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.<p>Kodi is not a "set-top box". Kodi is software. A set-top box might be <i>pre-loaded</i> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>It's their right to do so, but it's stupid and defies logic.
Google's mission statement: <a href="https://www.google.com/about/our-company/" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/about/our-company/</a><p><i>“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”<p>Since the beginning, our goal has been to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible.<p>Not just for some. For everyone.</i><p>To decrement something would appear to be contrary to making it universally accessible.
Quite ironic when you can use YouTube + Chromecast to watch entire episodes of many shows and many full length movies.<p>You can't ban software makers for the illegal use of their software by users when your own users and services are the same...<p>Why don't they remove "full episode" from YouTube's autocomplete? (We all know the answer to that one.)
How is it that software makers are culpable when their product us used to commit a crime but not gun manufactures?<p>Is it that copyright violation is such a "heinous" crime that special rules apply?
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.<p>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.
So does that mean they should remove all android devices that play Kodi? Oh, that hurts Google bottom line.. oh nevermind then.. let's just villanize Kodi developers.(Who have done a hell of a job I might add since the Xbox original with a modchip). This is grandstanding for show. Google is without a doubt the largest contributer to piracy via their indexing of, well, everything. Android should be worried about why their sandbox security is so terrible it allowed Facebook to gather sexting archives rivaling only that of Snapchat.
Unless Google removes Wikipeda too, it really doesn't matter what they remove.<p>Example; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)</a><p>All links there =) Anytime official site changes, this pages updated.<p>Wikipedia is your Search Engine, when Google fails.
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.
Alternative title: Bing expands their market, now your go-to for both porn and piracy.<p>Edit: also note that it's just the autocomplete, not the actual search results
Url changed from <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176894/google-removes-kodi-search-autocomplete-anti-piracy" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176894/google-removes-k...</a>, which points to this.
Google's talking about piracy, everyone else is talking about privacy.<p>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.<p>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.
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?