Filmon- no longer free

Medusa,

I take your point.

I am prepared to pay, and probably will have to, with the demise of free SD TV from Filmon.

I've got a paid for UK TV Licence but that doesn't entitle me to watch Beeb4 in the S of France alas !

I suppose the alternative is to buy a 2 metre dish and watch it via Sky but I'm not sure that's legal now (or even in the past).

Is everybody aware that under the new Digital Economy Bill it is now illegal to use software such as Kodi and other services which enable you to circumvent copyright on TV and web services?

 

The penalty is up to 10 years in prison for those who sell the equipment and software to enable this, but I have no idea whether or when they may enforce the penalties on users or how they may track everybody down.

Kodi is not illegal to use. It's a legitimate piece of software and the Kodi developers are very open about being anti-piracy. The problem is is that being open source allows it to be abused.

The laws are concerning people who distribute pirated material, be it through Kodi add-ons or other means. The only way you'll fall foul of the law is if you use Kodi to illegally distribute pirated material. The problem is, you may be unaware that you could be doing just that if you have any peer to peer (P2P) add-ons as these allow people to stream content off your box. You could for instance download a film to watch them others can download it off you without you knowing.

Is everybody aware that under the new Digital Economy Bill it is now illegal to use software such as Kodi and other services which enable you to circumvent copyright on TV and web services?

Actually it doesn't as its still perfectly legal to use Kodi and the circumvention of copyright of TV or web services is not in the bill. Its the Kodi add-ons that 3rd party individuals upload that can be illegal.

A quote from an article in the Independent:

"Anyone caught streaming TV shows, films and sports events illegally using websites, torrents and Kodi add-ons could technically face a decade behind bars."

The important bit is in bold. The laws were always about uploading and sharing with others illegal copyrighted content.

Kodi is just a media player. There's nothing illegal about it any more than Windows Media Player or VLC player.

That article from the Independent and all the other newspapers is wrong. The bill is going to pursue people selling "fully loaded" boxes and IPTV services and making money from being an unauthorised service provider.

Just a headsup - been looking at the alternative posted here (britishtvchanels) and never received registration to my gmail account. Also there are some other TV Apps on android that should not be touched with a bargepole - Malwarebytes for Android picked up on one I installed straight away - so worth installing Malwarebytes!

A lot of them are just different front ends for the Filmon stream, so they fail after 3 minutes.