A million piracy-enabled Kodi boxes sold in the UK show pirates not yet sunk

Kodi is a fantastic piece of open-source software for streaming content that you own onto a TV, but its versatility has lead to a huge market for people to modify it to stream content illegally. 

Just how massive a market has been created has been revealed recently by a new report by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) which claims that over a million of the piracy-enabled boxes have been sold in the UK over the past two years. 

These boxes are loaded full of piracy-enabling add-ons that are installed on top of the Kodi software before being sold on to consumers (usually via social media). The illegal modification can occur either before or after the boxes are imported into the country. 

Piracy on the fall

However, elsewhere in the report the news is more positive. The amount of people who access content illegally online has fallen from 30% of the population down to 25% since 2013, which we'd imagine is due to the increased availability of cheap legal options for watching content online. 

The drop certainly seems to suggest that the fight against piracy is slowly turning in favor of the copyright holders despite the explosion in the amount of these piracy-enabled boxes. 

Jon Porter

Jon Porter is the ex-Home Technology Writer for TechRadar. He has also previously written for Practical Photoshop, Trusted Reviews, Inside Higher Ed, Al Bawaba, Gizmodo UK, Genetic Literacy Project, Via Satellite, Real Homes and Plant Services Magazine, and you can now find him writing for The Verge.