TVAddons, on of the most popular repositories of Kodi add-ons, has been brought back to life after shutting down in June.
But though its website has been resurrected , it developer now faces a massive legal challenge against some of Canada's leading cable giants, including Bell, Rogers and Videotron.
Developed by Adam Lackman, TVAddons acts as a go between to connect online streaming sources to the Kodi interface. But while its developer sees it as little more than a search engine, its detractors see it as a piracy-enabling service, eating into their bottom lines.
A 'horrifying' experience
Legal teams have come at Lackman aggressively, to the point where the developer is looking to crowdsource funds for legal aid. And whether or not Lackman's activity proves defensible in court, it seems those who have been pursuing him may have overstepped the mark themselves through bad practice that included an overly-long interrogation and fishing for information on fellow Kodi developers, according to Torrentfreak.
"The whole experience was horrifying," said Lackman. "It felt like the kind of thing you would have expected to have happened in the Soviet Union."
Kodi, the underlying open-source program which TVAddons taps into, has been long trying to clean-up its own image. Its developers have distanced themselves from and denounced the piratical activity of third parties who have abused the open-nature of the application to distribute copyrighted material.
But Kodi's creators have no intention of making its enthusiast-friendly open nature any more closed off to counteract the bad eggs.
The recent spate of legal activity around accused offenders may, hopefully, allow Kodi to exist in the way it was intended – as a flexible home cinema platform through which users can enjoy their own content and legal streaming sources.
