We reported a few months ago that Dish Network had created a lawsuit targeting TVAddons and the 3rd party Kodi Add-on ZemTV for copyright infringement. Now they have updated the complaint to personally list the two owners of the site and 3rd party Kodi add-on.
According to a report from TorrentFreak Dish updated lawsuit ZemTV was developed by Shahjahan Durrani, who lives in London, UK. He allegedly controlled and maintained the addon which was used to stream infringing broadcasts of Dish content. The owner and operator of TVAddons is listed as Adam Lackman, who resides in Montreal, Canada.
“The ZemTV service is retransmitting these channels over the Internet to end-users that download the ZemTV add-on for the Kodi media player, which is available for download at the websites www.tvaddons.ag and www.tvaddons.org,” Dish’s lawyers said in their complaint.
TV Addons sent TorrentFreak a statement saying “TV ADDONS is not a piracy site, it’s a platform for developers of open source add-ons for the Kodi media center. As a community platform filled with user-generated content, we have always acted in accordance with the law and swiftly complied whenever we received a DMCA takedown notice.”
The site previously relied on the DMCA to shield it from liability but apparently, that wasn’t enough. As a result, they now check all submitted add-ons carefully.
“Since complying with the law is clearly not enough to prevent frivolous legal action from being taken against you, we have been forced to implement a more drastic code vetting process,” the TVAddons representative told Torrent Freak.
This lawsuit is the first of its kind in the United States. Other countries, such as Britain and Canada, have already had several.
Many will be watching this case closely because it could serve as a template for future lawsuits. Though as with all legal actions they are typically slow meaning we may not know anything this year.
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